Title: Starling House
Author: Alix E. Harrow
Genre: Fantasy, fantasy horror, gothic fantasy
Publisher: Tor Publishing Group
Publication Date: 2023
Format: Hardcover, Illumicrate edition
Length: 304 pages

Read if you like: gothic fantasy, anti-heroes, haunted houses, creepy fairy tales, contemporary setting, magical/sentient inanimate objects

Rating: 

As always, when my Illumicrate box arrived on my front step last month the book inside was a surprise. I love never knowing what to expect until my subscription gets here because often I’ve had my eye on the exact book that I receive. This was the case with Starling House, and I ended up loving this one even more than I expected to. 

Starling House was a fantastic book that kept me gripped and on the edge of my seat throughout much of the story. While it’s not quite an outright horror, there’s something creepy about the object of the FMC’s desire, which is a haunted house that her entire town abhors. I couldn’t put this one down once I picked it up and even though the characters weren’t exactly loveable, I came to feel a great affection for them by the end.

If you’re looking for something that’s equal parts creepy and gothic fantasy, I can’t think of a better fit than Starling House. Fans of Ninth House should enjoy this one greatly as much of the same anti-hero, desperate vibes appear here, albeit outside of an academic setting.

The Book: Starling House by Alix E. Harrow

Starling House follows main character Opal, a 20-something woman who has been stuck in a small, going-nowhere town in Kentucky called Eden ever since the death of her mother. The sole guardian of her brother Jasper, Opal is a high-school dropout who lives in a rundown motel room where she’s trying to scrape together enough money to send Jasper to a private school outside of their pollution-ridden town. She’s been working crappy retail jobs her whole life, but at night, when she’s all alone, she dreams of a run-down, haunted-looking house called Starling House that’s owned by a family that locals despise as outsiders. 

One day, after a bad day at work and continuous dreams about the house, Opal stops at Starling to convince the current owner, a young man named Arthur, to allow her in to take a look. While she’s convinced if she can just see Starling House that she’ll stop dreaming of it, Arthur is less than keen to allow Opal to snoop around. However, he eventually offers Opal a job as a housekeeper in secret hopes that the house will do the job of scaring Opal away, which she readily accepts at a rate that will allow her to cover the tuition for Jasper’s schooling. 

Arthur is determined that the more time Opal spends in the house, the less likely she’ll be to stay, but Opal feels the opposite. The longer she’s in the house, the more at home she feels, despite what she knows are dark secrets lurking around every corner. 

As the plot thickens, Opal and Arthur will have to work together if they wish to end the terrible legacy that Starling House has maintained until now, particularly if they wish to keep its misfortune from bleeding out into the rest of their town. 

The Review

This book was excellent, it kept me so gripped that I stayed up far too late to finish it.

The gothic, horror-y style of fantasy created a setting and ambiance that was so dark and mysterious that you felt completely immersed. I was consistently worried about what would be around each corner and what new type of monster might suddenly appear. The setting, while very different from Leigh Bardugo’s Ninth House, had a similar vibe to it, as did the main character. There was enough overlap that Ninth House immediately came to mind, but not enough that Starling House didn’t feel wholly unique in its own right. 

I also loved the antihero female main character Opal. She’s unapologetically criminal in so many ways but has this softness for the few that she actually cares about that endears you to her anyway. She self describes herself as selfish and self-destructive, but that mantra only holds so far until it impacts her loved ones. She was nicely layered, and I loved that she didn’t lose her edges as she grew and evolved. 

I also loved the way that ultimately, the monsters of the Underland served as a manifestation of the neglect and abuse that the core characters experienced at the hands of both powerful, abusive men and of the town of Eden as a whole. They represented both the cruelty of the town’s ostracizing and neglect of outsiders and also the penance they’re forced to pay for their perceived crimes. I thought it was an impactful approach that Harrow chose to weave multiple narratives together to form such an emotionally cutting story of facing your demons, both real and imagined, and how different people choose to deal with them. I was so emotionally invested that I felt a little exhausted (though satisfied) by the end. 

Harrow is a great writer. The setting, the characters, the symbolism, the depth of feeling, it was all just so masterfully done. I devoured this book in a couple of days and it left me staring awake at my ceiling, still processing, for hours afterward. This was a fantastic book that I would highly recommend.