Haunted houses can be a difficult trick to pull off in fiction: it is testament to Julie Myerson’s skill that her 10th novel features a haunted house that is not only entirely believable but deeply unsettling.
The two leading characters of The Stopped Heart are separated by a hundred years of history. In the present day, Mary Coles and her husband, Graham, are moving into a rundown Suffolk cottage to escape the emotional aftershocks of a family tragedy. A century before, 13-year-old Eliza occupied the house with her parents, her sprawling array of siblings and James Dix, a red-haired stranger who arrived at the house during a violent storm and has yet to leave.
It is not long before Mary starts to sense the cottage’s history: “A little way away she can see a man. Red-haired. Young. Her heart stirs at the sight…” Mary finds her sightings both comforting and disturbing. Meanwhile, Eliza’s younger sister, Lottie, is having visions too, albeit none of her family believes in them.
This is a novel in which events are experienced by those who are ill-equipped to understand them, whether due to immaturity, social context or the ravages of grief, placing the reader in a position of omniscience. And this is where Myerson’s skill really delivers: through Eliza’s naivety, it is the reader who senses James’s menacing psychopathy. Through the dual narrative, only the reader understands the significance of Lottie’s visions. And by standing outside Mary’s grief, it is the reader who fears on her behalf the attentions of her neighbour. So meticulously does Myerson draw these characters and so intricately does she interweave the narratives that reading the novel is like watching a film and shouting at the screen while a character fails to notice the murderer hiding under the bed.
The Stopped Heart is an eerie and disquieting ghost story about the nature of male desire, teenage rites of passage and how grief can shift the prism through which we perceive both the past and the present.
• The Stopped Heart by Julie Myerson is published by Jonathan Cape (£7.99). To order it for £6.79 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
