In Boyne's thriller, 19th-century England is infused with the supernatural. Narrator Larkin-born in America but raised in England-effectively captures Boyne's characters, particularly the manner in which both class and gender shape daily life. In giving voice to protagonist Eliza Caine-an unmarried, young schoolteacher who becomes a governess to a wealthy rural family shrouded in mystery-she ably conveys the character's stoic practicality and idealistic yearning for social acceptance and economic freedom. Larkin also does a masterful job rendering the male voices, especially prominent village figures such as the barrister and clergyman, both steeped in the male privilege of the era. Yet, the most memorable aspect of Larkin's performance is her eerie portrayal of the two young children at the center of the otherworldly forces that Eliza encounters. An Other Press paperback. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

After the sudden death of her beloved father, Eliza Caine makes the rash decision to leave her teaching position and become governess to two children at bleak Gaudlin Hall. Filled with horrifying circumstances, peculiar characters, and an enigmatic history, this novel, set in 1867, slowly unravels a tragic tale of love, sacrifice, and the supernatural. Alison Larkin's precise diction brings the genteel narrator to life, though listeners might be frustrated by Eliza's initial reticence to ask questions along with the continually furtive answers that she receives. Though the conduct is in keeping with the time period, modern listeners will have to keep this fact in mind. Many plotlines such as Eliza's budding feelings for the married solicitor are never thoroughly realized, interrupt the action and mood, and feel ancillary at best. VERDICT This is a supplementary purchase for most libraries, but it will be enjoyed by fans of Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Henry James, and spooky stories. ["With well-drawn characters and surprising twists, this book will appeal to fans of horror and historical fiction as well as anyone who likes a good ghost story," read the review of the Doubleday hc, LJ 10/1/13.]-Lisa Youngblood, Harker Heights P.L., TX (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Mysterious occurrences plague a Victorian teacher who moves in with two eerily well-mannered children. upon the death of her father, bookish, dowdy Eliza Caine answers an ad for a governess position at Gaudlin Hall, a rambling pile in the outer darkness of Victorian-era Norfolk. Eliza - totally alone in the world, her sole companions the protagonists of Dickens, her recent dreams filled with "dark graveyards THIS HOUSE IS HAUNTED By John Boyne 291 pp. Other Press. Paper, $14.95. and irregular vistas" - seems primed for a richly horrifying experience. Arriving soaked to the bone and in the dead of night, the new governess of Gaudlin finds not the greeting of a warm fire and a noble family at its ease, but two eerily well-mannered children alone in an otherwise empty house. Well, not exactly alone. There is someone else there. Or something else. Or something like that. Throughout the course of "This House Is Haunted," John Boyne's eighth novel for adults, it is difficult to tell who or what is actually doing what to whom or what. Eliza is obviously and justifiably unsettled by the lack of parents. She is also cuffed by sudden gusts of wind, harassed by what feels like a pair of hands, puzzled by occasionally locked windows and sometimes rustling curtains. She's recently attended Charles Dickens's "devilish" reading of "The Signal-Man," so we know she doesn't scare easily. And yet Boyne handles this first part ably enough. He tips his hat to Dickens, patron saint of moral orphans, even offering that early cameo. He draws a picture of Eliza as a young woman without much imagination, forced to use her raisin-sharp wits to carve out a brand-new life in a difficult new place. Unanswered, and intriguing, questions abound. Who are these weird children, anyway? Who is the woman in the yard, the old man by the driveway? Just how tight-lipped can a villager get? Whence bloweth these highly selective winds? How mahoganied and manneraddled will the dialogue become? How many "answers came there none" and "I daresays" can be endured before we begin to search behind shrubbery and stonewalls for the "Masterpiece Theater" camera crew? Most important, will Eliza be able to unravel the mystery at the heart of Gaudlin Hall before it unravels her? The scene set, we readers should careen, hairs raised high, through the darkened rooms of Gaudlin Hall. The pages should turn themselves. That they don't is due not to a lack of ghostly fingers but to a lack of fun, and with it Boyne's seeming desire to qualify his ghoulish tale every step of the way. "I think any story which concerns itself with the afterlife and with forces that the human mind cannot truly understand risks disquiet for the reader," Eliza tells her father early on. Apparently Boyne feels the same. Gaudlin Hall is big, but not as big as she'd imagined it. Deep, dark secrets turn out to be only as deep and dark as one or two visits to the solicitor's office. The same goes for secret doors, which dependably appear when needed, dispelling fear rather than compounding it. There is so little here to frighten and preoccupy, in fact, that midway through the novel the reader's sense of suspense turns inward, away from the motivations of the young governess and toward the motivations of the author himself. If Boyne is trying to spin a frightening yarn, then why is it so thoroughly unfrightening? If, however, he is trying to give us a parody, then why does the humor in "This House Is Haunted" appear only as hairline cracks in the paint? Near the outset of Jane Austen's "Northanger Abbey," Catherine Morland asks Isabella Thorpe, "But are they all horrid, are you sure they are all horrid?" Although Catherine may initially doubt the bloodcurdling power of the novels her friend is feeding her, the macabre collection she reads, known collectively today as "The Northanger Horrids," are indeed dreadful enough to work upon her overheated imagination, twisting the prosaic world around her into high Gothic melodrama. "Northanger Abbey" is a satire of books like "The Castle of Wolfenbach" and "The Necromancer" - but while Austen pokes fun at them, she doesn't give up the chance to send a shiver down the reader's spine herself whenever she gets the chance, showing that by the time of her writing the Gothic as a genre was already so well defined that its stable of trusty chillers (lonely castles, mist-soaked moors, virginal maidens and cold, cruel noblemen with deep, dark secrets) could also get a laugh. surely the sturdy, time-tested plot at the center of "This House Is Haunted" has often shown itself to be a worthy trap door, pulling readers into terrifying, macabre worlds of decadence and decay. Add in some hackneyed nurses, though, maybe a little hot foreign blood and gouts of unrelenting, Downton-esque dialogue, and this book might also have been its own stiff form of hilarious. As Austen and others have proved, Gothic can be both wicked and winking. Unfortunately "This House Is Haunted" is neither. Or is it? It's a tantalizing idea. What if Boyne's novel is itself a Gothic manse, honeycombed with secret passages, occult symbolism and a subterranean river of terror, all there for the right lucky reader to stumble upon in the dead of night, candle raised? Indeed there are hints that Boyne is having more fun with his characters and their surroundings than we are. It is pointed out, mysteriously, that Cratchett, the recalcitrant solicitor's clerk, has never heard of Dickens, or the world-famous character who more or less bears his name. A visit to the village church yields up an unsettling fruit salad of scriptural warnings, mysterious footsteps and organ drones, which all seem to suggest something more locked beneath the surface of the story if only we had the right key. Alas, we don't, and the result is little more than occasional fog, characters as starchy and bloodless as scones, a mildly unfriendly house, ominously mild children, mildly reticent villagers and one thrillingly mild love frisson. The whole novel feels decorous and protective toward sweet, blunted Eliza Caine, who seems like a nice girl and someone who doesn't need any more problems, natural or supernatural, in her life. Such courtliness leaves the reader to wander the misty moor between terror and parody, uncertain as to whether we should be laughing with or at the author's own grim determination that nothing about the book should ever appear to have been written either in fright or in fun. We can only wonder what Catherine Morland would have thought. ? josh ritter is the author of the novel "Bright's Passage" and a singer-songwriter whose most recent album is "The Beast in Its Tracks."