With the Fall season upon us, coffee or tea and cozy reads are all the rage. If you’re looking to curl up with a blanket and dive into a book that fits the season but doesn’t stir panic and cause you to toss your book into the freezer (à la Joey Tribbiani on “Friends”), Starling House by Alix E. Harrow is just what you’re looking for.
In Eden, Kentucky, a small coal town with more mysteries than there are citizens, a looming structure calls to the broody, sardonic, and painfully stubborn protagonist, Opal. That structure is Starling House, whose gates are as unnerving as the house itself.
The gates of Starling House don’t look like much from a distance — just a dense tangle of metal half-eaten by rust and ivy, held shut by a padlock so large it almost feels rude — but up close you can make out individual shapes: clawed feet and legs with too many joints, scaled backs and mouths full of teeth, heads with empty holes for eyes.
The creatures on the gates remind Opal of the Beasts inThe Underland, a book with which she has long been obsessed. She used to stare at The Underland‘s illustrations, “a series of stark lithographs that fall somewhere between eerie and nightmarish.” “Looking at them,” she says, “felt like stepping into someone else’s skull, someone who knew the same things I knew: that there were sharp teeth behind every smile, and bare bones waiting beneath the pretty skin of the world.”
The book’s author, E. Starling, disappeared more than one hundred years before, and The Underland serves as a “story within a story” here.
For many years, Opal had passed Starling House, unsure of why it beckoned to her, why it resonated with her, why she couldn’t stop dreaming about it at night. Aside from an ever-present light in the attic, the house looked long-deserted and forsaken. “The windows are filmy eyes above rotten sills. Empty nests sag from the eaves. The foundation is cracked and slanted, as if the entire thing is sliding into the open mouth of the earth.”
Then, one day, when Arthur Starling, the lone proprietor of Starling House, appears at the gate and advises Opal to run, she runs. She vows never to return. And yet she does return, soon becoming Starling’s housekeeper, acquainting herself with the house’s many quirks and intricacies. She quits her job at the local Tractor Supply and supplements her housekeeper’s paycheck by stealing objects from around the house and pawning them, all to send her sixteen-year-old brother Jasper to boarding school, far away from Eden.
Opal and Jasper are without family except for Bev, the surly, tobacco-chewing landlord of the hotel where they have lived since before their mother died, and Charlotte, the quiet librarian who has one foot out of town. These characters and their stories are all neatly woven together as Opal’s time at Starling House begins to reveal a surprising history, not just of the town but of her own family, too. What starts as a standard orphaned-children-meet-a-wealthy-man-and-their-life-changes-forever story quickly digresses into a tangled fable of beasts and birds, life and death, fiction and reality, and an overall coming-to-terms with where one belongs and the true meaning of “home.”
As many quirks as there are in the physical Starling House, there are just as many within Starling House, the novel. There are footnotes, point-of-view shifts, a fictive Wikipedia page, and illustrations from The Underland – so many idiosyncrasies to distract, but also engage, the reader. In the very end, we come to discover why much of the book is written the way it is.
Harrow’s strength is her pristine and atmospheric writing. The details of Starling House, the small town of Eden, The Underland, the beasts, the landscape, and even the relationships of all the characters are brought to life so thoroughly and decisively that it’s hard not to be utterly engulfed in the story.
Much like the author’s previous fantasy novels, The Ten Thousand Doors of January and The Once and Future Witches, Starling House is at once whimsical and tangible, if only for the illustrative words writ on each page. What’s more, this contemporary Southern Gothic novel brings alive older parables like “Beauty and the Beast” or “The Labyrinth,” but adds a modern flair with significant themes, including environmental issues and the value of not letting power get into the wrong hands. On top of all that, there is, naturally, an epic – if a bit dark and unexpected – love story to assuage any romantics out there.
In short, whether you’re a Ray Bradbury-classified Autumn Person who “functions in the dark,” or you lean away from horror and toward the heroine’s journey in your fable-like reads, Starling House has something for you.
Starling House
By Alix E. Harrow
Tor Books
Published October 3, 2023
Southern Review of Books 
Beautiful post 🌹
LikeLike