Solace House

Alex Lane has just wrapped his first year of university in 1993. While his classmates head home or off to summer adventures abroad, Alex has made no plans, mostly because he has nowhere to go and no money to get there. He elects to quietly stay on campus, haunting his old dorm like a ghost, until the university finally starts to catch on that they have an unplanned summer resident.

To his luck, an unlikely opportunity arises: Alex is offered a summer job working for the university at a remote site, where he and a few fellow students are tasked with clearing out an abandoned property slated to become new dormitories. The pay is good, and Alex readily accepts.

At the work site, Alex meets a ragtag group of students from varied backgrounds. Having nearly finished cleaning out an on-site hospital—formerly an asylum—the crew is redirected to a large Victorian home on the property known as Solace House. Inside, they find a hoarder's paradise packed with absurd stacks of every conceivable object: "The clutter absorbed everything, conquering, smothering, and consuming."

As the crew works, they uncover secrets about the property and its former owner, Edwin Flayne. Amidst the chaos, the students discover Flayne's extensive journals—initially reading like the ramblings of a madman—which reveal his belief that the house held special powers and functioned as a portal. He wrote that Solace House "was a Thin Place, where nature schemes a complex union with the higher realms, and intersects with the unseen places." As the students dig deeper into his writings and the house itself, they begin to suspect Flayne was less crazy than his hoarding suggested.

The novel is quite long and deliberately paced; bits of information are doled out in snippets, interspersed into the daily monotony of removing tons of Flayne's hoarded possessions. There is mystery, tension, and even a smidge of romance, as the secrets of Solace House start to come to light. When the students aren't working, one of their favorite ways to pass the time is recreational drug use, and they soon realize that the more altered they make themselves, the more Solace House reveals. There is an undercurrent of the supernatural and horror as well, and as the novel progresses, what is true and what is imagined become exceedingly hard to distinguish. It's a trippy romp as Alex's grasp of reality becomes increasingly tenuous. "How precious and precarious is sanity, how fleeting, how utterly unappreciated."

As that boundary between truth and illusion grows murkier, readers might hope for a grand reveal to bring everything into focus. The novel does take an interesting turn in its final quarter, one that had me hopeful for a mind-blowing conclusion. However, mystery reigns over clarity, leaving readers to draw their own conclusions. Author Will Maclean deserves immense credit for writing an absurd number of rhyming AB-AB quatrains to enrich the story—a feat worth five stars on effort alone. Yet for me, Solace House was just a bit too slow and quirky to reach that highest peak.