The House on Vesper Sands by Paraic ODonnell review a genre-busting gothic

Who is stealing souls in Whitechapel? O’Donnell brings Victorian London gloriously to life in an unorthodox confection of thrills and chills

Paraic O’Donnell is a headache for those who like to organise their bookshelves by genre. His first novel, The Maker of Swans, was a gothic mashup of murder, magic, fairytale and literary fantasy. Linguistically inventive and rich with wordplay, it was a period piece that deliberately blurred the specifics of period.

His second, The House on Vesper Sands, similarly defies categorisation, though this time we know exactly where we are: the novel unfolds in a vividly evoked England during the bitter winter of 1893. From the first pages it promises the same gothic spookiness as its predecessor; on a snowy night in February, a seamstress, Esther Tull, arrives at the Mayfair house of Lord Strythe to make final alterations to an intricately stitched white gown. As she follows the butler up the poorly lit stairs, she catches fragments of whispered conversations behind closed doors: “In this house a great deal happened that went unseen.” Esther is in considerable pain, though she is careful not to show it. The butler locks her into the attic sewing room, as he has done many times before, and takes up a position outside. Alone and silently, Esther cleans the wound on her side so that the words she has sewn into her skin are clearly legible. Then she climbs on the windowsill and jumps.

On the same night, a penniless and harassed Cambridge student, Gideon Bliss, arrives in London to stay with his uncle. When the old man is not at home, he is forced to seek shelter in a church where he discovers the prone body of Angie Tatton, a protege of his uncle’s with whom he was once more than a little in love: dressed in nothing but a white shift and half delirious, she raves about brightness and black air until an unseen attacker clamps a rag over Gideon’s mouth and he passes out. When he comes round she is gone. Desperate to find her, he attaches himself with some ingenuity to Inspector Cutter of Scotland Yard.

He is not the only one looking for answers. Octavia Hillingdon, a society columnist seeking more serious work, has been leant on by her editor to look into the Spiriters, a shadowy band of criminals and staple of London’s gutter press who are gruesomely claimed to be “stealing souls in Whitechapel”. Octavia’s reluctant investigations bring her ever closer to Gideon’s own inquiries and finally, of course, to the mysterious house on Vesper Sands.

Death throws an ever-looming shadow over proceedings – the book’s sections are even named after parts of the Requiem Mass – but O’Donnell has no intention of serving up a standard Victorian chiller. Instead he has created a gloriously unorthodox confection, part Wilkie Collins, part Conan Doyle, with a generous handful of police procedural and a splash of Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm. There is even a distinctly Hitchcockian interlude on a train.

The genre-busting ambitions of The Maker of Swans divided critics. The House on Vesper Sands is structurally more satisfying and driven by a more compelling plot. O’Donnell has pulled off with brio something that might, in a lesser writer’s hands, have fallen horribly flat: he has written a coherent and satisfying novel that is both disquietingly eerie and properly funny. It is impossible to read it without laughing out loud. Sharp, impatient and eye-wateringly brusque, Inspector Cutter powers through the pages, relentlessly squashing the assiduous, overeducated Gideon with his scathing remarks. The determinedly diplomatic accounts Gideon writes of his superior’s interviews as he conducts his inquiries are comic works of art. As for the splendidly doughty Octavia, she is a Victorian Flora Poste, a bicycle-riding self-starter who brooks no resistance and, in pursuit of information, does not flinch from deploying “the method she knew best. She would encourage the right kind of people to say the wrong kind of thing.” O’Donnell dispenses the waspish wit of the beau monde with Wildean relish.

Yet none of this detracts from the unsettling strangeness of the book’s central mystery. Through the filthy fog of the crowded London streets and out to the bleak wind-scoured Kent coastline, Angie’s plight is unspooled. The dramatic denouement is striking and pleasingly unexpected. And while the laughs provide welcome respite from the darkness, their greater achievement is to bring a kind of bracing tenderness to a tale that might, in these #MeToo times, have felt voyeuristic and exploitative. Beneath its spooky exterior The House on Vesper Sands is a paean to the unshowy virtues of determination, diligence and loyalty. It is also a cracking good read. The book ends with an epilogue that could be dismissed as superfluous, except that it plainly lays the ground for a sequel. Regardless of where one ends up filing this novel on the bookshelves, that is excellent news for us all.

Clare Clark’s We That Are Left is published by Vintage. The House on Vesper Sands by Paraic O’Donnell (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £14.99). To order a copy for £12.89, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.

This article was amended on 25 October. An earlier version referred to The House at Vesper Sands. The book’s title is The House on Vesper Sands.

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