A few years ago, I had the pleasure of meeting musician Thomas Dolby, one of my teenage heroes. This was as part of a small tour he was doing to show people a film he had made about Orfordness lighthouse in Suffolk, an abandoned landmark on the British coast which was adjacent to a disused Atomic Weapons Research Base, itself surrounded in strange stories and mystery.
The area is clearly ripe for inspiring tales that are creepy. Coincidentally, this area is also the setting of Neil Spring’s The Haunted Shore, although the story takes place not around the lighthouse (recently demolished, sadly), but a renovated Martello Tower on the same stretch of coast.
From the publisher: “When Lizzy moves to a desolate shore to escape her past, she hopes to find sanctuary. But a mysterious stranger is waiting for her, her father’s carer, and when darkness falls, something roams this wild stretch of beach, urging Lizzy to investigate its past. The longer she stays, the more the shore’s secrets begin to stir. Secrets of a sea that burned, of bodies washed ashore — and a family’s buried past reaching into the present.
And when Lizzy begins to suspect that her father’s carer is a dangerous imposter with sinister motives, a new darkness rises. What happens next is everyone’s living nightmare . . .”
Lizzy Valentine is a bright young thing who seemingly has everything going for her – great job in London, well paid, nice flat – but when her life all falls apart, she returns to the hamlet of Shingle Street to live with Clifford, her architect father who lives in a redeveloped Martello tower on the Suffolk coast.
Upon her return she finds that her brother Colin is no longer living with her father but instead, living in the tower with her father, there is Hazel, a woman who is Lizzy’s father’s carer. This is a surprise, a change that is unknown to Lizzy. Lizzy does not get on with this stranger and even less so when Clifford is admitted to hospital after a stroke.
Other strange things become apparent – Clifford’s bank accounts are empty. Is Hazel an imposter taking the family for all she can get, or is she a genuinely caring professional caring for an adult in the throes of dementia? And then there’s the strange things that seem to happen around outside the tower at night…
Neil has made a habit of writing novels with unreliable narrators – his 2013 novel The Ghost Hunters, based on Borley Rectory (and reviewed HERE) was another one, as too the 2017 sequel The Lost Village (reviewed HERE). With this in mind, it should not be too much of a surprise that whilst seeing things from a third-person narrative focused on Lizzy, the reader is not sure that what they are reading is accurate or even real.
Is the plot about Lizzy slowly becoming unravelled, the consequences of a high-stress job in London? Or is it something more elemental, even supernatural? The author does well to keep us guessing along the way as things get stranger and stranger. Events become more strange and increasingly fractious as the book continues. The descriptions of the Suffolk landscape are effective in evoking a bleak wilderness, by turns remote and desolate. To create that solid connection with reality, Neil uses real places to make the reader feel that the situation is real. The Morello towers, for example, built for Britain’s defence in the Napoleonic Wars, are still there to see.
The plot and the pace are deceptively readable. Neil manages to set the scene well and make Lizzy’s deteriorating psychological situation seem possible, as well as make the reader want to find out what happens next.
There are lots of homage moments here, I think. The strange carer in the desolate house reminded me a little of Mrs Danvers in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, and anyone who has read M R James’ Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad or A Warning to the Curious will know how memorably eerie the Suffolk landscape can be, something which Neil does well to evoke. There’s even a possible touch of Nigel Kneale’s Stone Tapes in there too, with the idea that physical objects and places seem to absorb past traumatic events.
The ending revolves around a big reveal which on the whole works, although I did get the feeling that it wrapped things up rather quickly and was a little like that James Bond-plot point where the villains explain everything just before the end.
Nevertheless, overall, The Haunted Shore is an effective page turner that reads easily and keeps the reader’s attention. A good one to read on a dark and stormy Hallowe’en night!
The Haunted Shore by Neil Spring
Published by Quercus, October 2020
384 pages
ISBN: 978-1787470101
Review by Mark Yon
