CW: Suicide, Mental Illness

Spooky season is upon us (my favorite season BTW) and if you are in the mood for something delightfully Gothic with horror elements, I recommend The Nesting. This book works perfectly as a Gothic thriller, is deeply creepy, and has an interesting take on environmentalism. The only thing that I wasn’t certain of was the treatment of the heroines’ mental illness.

First of all, this is a very spooky book, so if you like Gothics but are iffy on horror, you might want to pass on this one. To give you one indication of the level of spookiness, one of the little girls the heroine nannies for sees a “lady with no eyes” living in their basement on a routine basis.

That heroine is Lexi, although she’s going by the name Sophie for most of the story. Lexi is in crisis. She’s had a mental break that includes severe depression and hallucinations. Her boyfriend is overwhelmed and asks her to move out, essentially leaving her homeless. Her best friend turns out to be sleeping with that boyfriend. Lexi has no home support as her mother is a drug addict.

One day on the train, Lexi overhears the real Sophie talking to her friends about a nanny job she’s declining in Norway. It’s for an English family: the father is a famous architect building his showpiece house, the mother is recently deceased and there are two young daughters, Gaia and Coco. When the real Sophie asks Lexi to watch her laptop while she and her friends go for a snack, Lexi responds to the job offer on Sophie’s behalf, setting up an interview and manages to hide her deception.

Lexi is successful in her interview, although in one hilarious scene, finds out she’s supposed to be a master at vegan cooking and realizes she’s got a steep learning curve ahead of her. She winds up in Norway with the Faraday family.

Already as a reader I was deeply uneasy. The idea of two children being cared for by a woman who lied about her identity and is only just recovering from a mental health crisis with no medical or psychiatric support is terrifying. Even though Lexi is the narrator, and we are meant to be sympathetic to her, the entire situation felt poised on the edge of disaster.

If Lexi’s deception is occasionally less than perfect (see vegan cooking) the Faraday family is in no state to notice. Tom Faraday moved his family to Norway at his late wife’s behest and planned to build a house that would be his architectural legacy. But when Tom rerouted a river (illegally) in order to accomodate the build site, he inadvertently created a marsh and the house sank. Then his wife Aurelia’s body is found, after she presumably committed suicide. Tom, financially and emotionally drained, has a single-minded obsession with finishing a second house, better than the first, that’s he’s named Aurelia’s Nest.

The story is told from two viewpoints, Lexi’s in the present day and Aurelia’s in the past. As we get the mystery of WTF is going on here, we also get the mystery of what really happened to Aurelia. Was she suicidal? Murdered? Was it the no-eye lady?

This is pretty much a perfect horror set-up and from a pacing standpoint everything unfolds beautifully. We alternate between Lexi and Aurelia’s points of view, as they both become aware that something is deeply wrong with their situations. Both Tom and Aurelia have supernatural experiences they can’t explain early on in their move. These have only escalated by the time Lexi moves in. It’s clear that they are very unwelcome on this land.

I also liked the idea that by changing the landscape, which results in disruptions to wildlife, Tom and Aurelia have awoken something ancient and menacing. Tom’s only concern is how this house will impact his career and legacy. He’s selfish and ego-driven. I think that’s one of my favorite themes in horror, right along with vengeful female ghosts. There is something big and ancient here, and it’s not a fan of Tom or anyone else. It’s in some ways a Lovecraftian sense of terror–not only are you in peril, but you’re also incredibly small and insignificant to the thing that haunts you.

It’s unusual for me to find a book genuinely scary, where I notice my heart race a little. This book nailed that through the slow progression of suspense and dread that builds to a point where I was just waiting for something terrifying and sudden to happen. It’s the same feeling as when you build to a “boo” scene in a movie.

The only thing that didn’t work for me in this book was the depiction of mental illness. It’s clear that Aurelia is suffering from postpartum depression, if not psychosis, but since Tom is also seeing ghostly things it’s hard to say whether or not mental illness is the sole cause of her anxiety. Lexi’s mental illness is addressed in a similarly vague way. We know she was severely depressed and also having hallucinations, but once she comes to Norway the focus on that vanishes. The book never establishes why she stops hallucinating or why her mental health suddenly improves to the point where she’s functioning more or less normally. Mental illness is a serious thing and I thought it needed to be treated with a little more attention to detail rather than just used as means for the heroines to question their own judgement. That said, gaslighting is a Gothic narrative device so while I thought it could have been handled better, I wasn’t surprised that it was used as a tool to make the narrators unreliable.

The Nesting is a great spooky-season read if you’re okay with some pretty scary elements. If you like your Gothics a little tamer or are easily frightened, then I would pass.