Sarah Waters's masterly novel is a perverse hymn to decay, to the corrosive power of class resentment as well as the damage wrought by war. Hundreds Hall is crawling with blights and moulds, crumbling from subsidence and water damage … The reader of Affinity will know that Waters is creepily conversant with ways to scare us. The reader of Fingersmith will know how deftly she handles a plot twist. The Little Stranger is a more controlled and composed novel than her last book, the widely admired The Night Watch, which was set during the second world war. Here she deploys the vigour and cunning one finds in Margaret Atwood's fiction. She has the same narrative ease and expansiveness, and the same knack of twisting the tension tighter and tighter within an individual scene … Waters manages the conclusion of her book with consummate, quiet skill. It is gripping, confident, unnerving and supremely entertaining.
Sarah Waters ain't afraid of no ghost. Her new novel, a deliciously creepy tale called The Little Stranger, is haunted by the spirits of Henry James and Edgar Allan Poe … The supernatural creaks and groans that reverberate through this tale are accompanied by malignant strains of class envy and sexual repression that infect every perfectly reasonable explanation we hear. The result is a ghost story as intelligent as it is stylish … Waters teases us with clues that send us running off in every direction: psychological, paranormal and socioeconomic. But the story's sustained ambiguity is what keeps our attention, and her perfectly calibrated tone casts an unnerving spell over these pages.
Sarah Waters is an excellent, evocative writer, and this is an incredibly gripping and readable novel. But to some extent her skill works against her. The Ayreses are such lovingly depicted and realistic characters that it becomes hard to accept their gothic fates … If death is a harsh sentence for all but the flattest fictional characters, then one is left with the uncomfortable sense that the Ayreses have been needlessly murdered by progress and social change, which doesn’t feel quite right either.
Class anxiety is the animating force behind Waters' fifth book, The Little Stranger, a suspenseful and psychologically layered haunted-house story set in the aftermath of World War II, when the fading gentry collided with the emerging professional class that would once have been the help … Waters, a master at stoking anticipation, withholds the truth about her ghost until the final pages. By then we already strongly suspect its identity, but the confirmation is subtle, surprising, and deeply, deeply chilling.
Sarah Waters' masterly, enthralling new novel, The Little Stranger, hews to the essential aspects of the traditional ghost story: the big spooky country house with a tragic past, the peculiar noises and eerie events that slowly intensify into a terrifying assault, the blurring line between internal turmoil and external phenomena, the skeptical scientific observer nudged ever closer to belief. Yet Waters has boldly reassigned all these gothic motifs from their usual Freudian duties to another detail entirely: The Little Stranger is about class, and the unavoidable yet lamentable price paid when venerable social hierarchies begin to erode … Waters has managed to write a near-perfect gothic novel while at the same time confidently deploying the form into fresher territory. It's an astonishing performance, right down to the book's mournful and devastating final sentence.
This second novel does not work so well. At any rate it failed to frighten me. It is too much of a pastiche; vivid enough, but too self-conscious for its own good. Though there’s an obvious connecting theme – that the ghosts of the past return to take vengeance on the present – Waters fails to capitalise on it … In The Little Stranger, the feeling is that Waters has done her research properly and the book will adapt brilliantly to the screen, but she doesn’t believe … I stayed up into the small hours absorbed by the book, even while I was fuming at its failings, and didn’t regret it one bit.
...a marvelous and truly spooky historical novel … Something larger than life seems to be at work, and the spooky happenings at Hundreds are only set off by Faraday's scientific cynicism. As a strange spot on an old and mouldering ceiling takes on a sinister appearance and bodies begin to accumulate, Waters's precise and chilling prose lets Dr. Faraday have his way with the story. As he slowly lets us in on his disappointments and dreams, we become more aware of the old prejudices and disappointments that have made him the man — and the narrator — he is. Determined to unravel the mystery of Hundreds Hall, and perhaps to better understand his own past, Dr. Faraday comes alive in The Little Stranger, ably serving as a guide between two worlds, or maybe more.
Waters’ scrupulously engineered plot builds efficiently to a truly scary highpoint halfway through her long narrative. But tensions relax perilously, as the doctor’s repeated emergency visits to Hundreds Hall become almost risibly indistinguishable, and even crucial dramatic moments are muffled by fervent conversations among the four major characters. Furthermore, too many crucial pieces of information are relayed secondhand, as Faraday summarizes accounts of other people’s experiences. Still, Waters has extended her range agreeably, working in traditions established by Edgar Allan Poe, Sheridan le Fanu and Wilkie Collins, expertly teasing us with suggestive allusions to the classics of supernatural fiction.
