Dennis Mombauer

Stelliform Press has yet to disappoint me, and this tale of a "haunted house for the climate change era" lived up to what I've come to expect from the stories it represents. The work is complex, tightly told, and gorgeously written. As a novella, it unfolds a full world that you wouldn't expect to come through in so few pages, and does so in a manner that demands a reader's full attention and care. Mombauer's style is so visual and offered in such a collage-like style that there's no way to read without picturing the setting and the mansion at the heart of this book, and although it was sometimes a slightly slower work than I'd expected, I loved every moment. Haunting and creepy and perfectly timed, this is a novella worth finding.… (altro)

The storyline is a variation on the ‘lost manuscript’ trope of Gothic literature: a filmmaker in Sri Lanka is looking for the ‘human story’ to give ballast to a documentary (called…House of Drought) about climate change, and comes across an abandoned mansion at the edge of the jungle. The stories behind the mansion’s bad name are revealed, along with its entanglement with the local legend of the Sap Mother in the jungle, and reach their final interlinking when the director goes into the house to explore.

Readers for whom a sense of connection to the characters is important may be disappointed; the similarity between them would make it difficult to choose a ‘main’ character, one whose fate matters. On the other hand, this does successfully reinforce the house as a main character, reminiscent of Shirley Jackson’s 'The Haunting of Hill House'. The unnamed mansion, the ‘Dry House’, has a similarly possessive relationship with the land beside which it was built, and it is said more than once, should not have been built, it is wrong, not real, like Jackson’s ‘not sane’ Hill House. First seen through a haze, the Dry House is firmly (if anything here is firm) located on the borders: between the food-producing paddy-fields, and the jungle, away from the main track, but rattled by passing heavy lorries, its material form harking back to colonial times, its current tattered state reflecting the passing of those times.

The narrative’s point of view switches as each story is told to unravel the mansion’s mysteries. The stories intersect, but it reads less like overlapping and more like tunnelling; each storyline that is introduced shine new lights down bizarre tunnels, that reflect against, but don’t illuminate, what is there. [They are like a sort of spiral, or return].

Each story starts in the middle of the culminating action, and then shifts back to its beginning. This moving backwards in very small steps, like a frame-by-frame reversal of film, is very effective. It has the disorienting effect of a spiral, and (to mix sensory metaphors) it echoes the appearance and behaviour of the passageways in the house later on. But the impact of this tight winding of the narrative is reduced here and there, because of the muddiness of the time-frame. The film director’s narrative is contemporary, but the chronological relationship between each story is not clear until later (and sometimes not at all). This is partly because the story has a feature of a sort of compression of time (like time-slip stories, where people have lengthy experiences but in ‘their’ time have only been away minutes), but without leaving signposts for the reader as to where they are in history. But it is also partly because there is no real difference in the ways that the characters, and their interactions with the house and its surroundings, are presented. They speak the same way, they notice the same things, and this has the effect of flattening out the time-line, to the detriment of the atmosphere of unease.

This lack of clarity is a weakness. The book has two particular characteristics that mean clarity is vital: being a novella, it is short, and secondly, it relies in part on necessary vagueness or imprecision. Its length means there is less time to get into a narrative stride. The story has to sprint – not necessarily be fast-paced, but the communication of ideas and events has to be achieved with great assurance. Reliance on vagueness needs to be supported. There is a lot of tension and dread to be inspired by lack of precision – think of Blackwood’s 'The Willows' – but for this to work, everything around the necessarily vague elements has to have a strongly-contrasting precision. Otherwise, the story becomes murky, and, instead of being confident that they have landed firmly on their feet, the reader is distracted by untangling details that should have been clear. This is a pity, because the story is very well imagined and engaging, and the nature of the house, and of its interactions with people, are very individual.

The blurb for the book draws attention to the story’s connection to climate change. The mansion can be read as a metaphor for the sort of anthropocentric bias that reduces complex ecological systems to the status of ‘resource’ or ‘potential’, and this is very well done. When the house was built, it was “driven like a stake” into the heart, or spirit, of the forest, which manifests in the Sap Mother. But the practical consequences, and the lived experiences, both of climate change and colonialism/postcolonialism are spoken of by characters, without having sufficient presence in the story. In contrast with this, the experiences of the Dry House, and the encounters with the Sap Mother, are very detailed, and are key parts of the direct narrative. The physical interior(s) of the house are very compelling, subtle, and unnerving, with a constant a tension between the mechanical and the biological. The Sap Mother’s appearance is described by a character in folklore language (“her eyes are oily seeds, her teeth blossom in the night soil”) and her appearance in the narrative is frightening, being amorphous and imprecise. Fiction used to make points can become a lecture rather than a story, so this may have been a safer choice, but it means that the climate-change concern of the story is secondary to the strong Gothic and myth or ghost story elements.

The prose and – apart from the disruptions of linearity – the narrative style are straightforward. There is no drama in typography or appearance, and no translation of emotion into intense physicality, that is often relied on to rack up tension. The pace can feel a little slow, but this has the benefit of creating a tension with events as the story unwinds. Though in some places – especially with the characters’ interactions – there is some flatness, settings and descriptions are well-realised, especially the build-up of unease and oddness in and around the house.

In short, The House of Drought is well worth the time of any reader with a taste for Gothic literature, though it needed a bit more polishing to make it sparkle like the gem it very nearly is.… (altro)