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Sarah Waters

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The Little Stranger Kindle Edition

by Sarah Waters (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

3.9 5,780 ratings

Goodreads Choice Award nominee

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Soon to be a major motion picture, directed by Lenny Abrahamson and starring Domhnall Gleeson and Ruth Wilson.

"The #1 book of 2009...Several sleepless nights are guaranteed."—Stephen King, Entertainment Weekly

One postwar summer in his home of rural Warwickshire, Dr. Faraday, the son of a maid who has built a life of quiet respectability as a country physician, is called to a patient at lonely Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for over two centuries, the Georgian house, once impressive and handsome, is now in decline, its masonry crumbling, its gardens choked with weeds, the clock in its stable yard permanently fixed at twenty to nine. Its owners—mother, son, and daughter—are struggling to keep pace with a changing society, as well as with conflicts of their own. But are the Ayreses haunted by something more sinister than a dying way of life? Little does Dr. Faraday know how closely, and how terrifyingly, their story is about to become intimately entwined with his.

Print length

492 pages
Language

English
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Riverhead Books
Publication date

March 31, 2009
File size

4882 KB
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Editorial Reviews

From Bookmarks Magazine

At its core, The Little Stranger is an old-fashioned ghost story, complete with spooky house, eccentric inhabitants, an air of general madness and malcontent, and a narrator who may not be as mild-mannered as he seems. What elevates this novel from the crowded genre is Waters’s ability to evoke the subtleties of the past as she skillfully weaves tension and dread into each paragraph. The reviewer from Newsday likened this tale to the psychological classic The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. Perhaps the critic from the Telegraph (who voiced only a very minor complaint about the ending) summed up the reviewers’ opinions best of all by hailing this novel as a genuinely creepy story “guaranteed to make anyone with a pulse gibber in fright.”
Copyright 2009 Bookmarks Publishing LLC --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Waters (The Night Watch) reflects on the collapse of the British class system after WWII in a stunning haunted house tale whose ghosts are as horrifying as any in Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House. Doctor Faraday, a lonely bachelor, first visited Hundreds Hall, where his mother once worked as a parlor maid, at age 10 in 1919. When Faraday returns 30 years later to treat a servant, he becomes obsessed with Hundreds's elegant owner, Mrs. Ayres; her 24-year-old son, Roderick, an RAF airman wounded during the war who now oversees the family farm; and her slightly older daughter, Caroline, considered a natural spinster by the locals, for whom the doctor develops a particular fondness. Supernatural trouble kicks in after Caroline's mild-mannered black Lab, Gyp, attacks a visiting child. A damaging fire, a suicide and worse follow. Faraday, one of literature's more unreliable narrators, carries the reader swiftly along to the devastating conclusion. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

From AudioFile

Sarah Waters's devotion to period detail, painstakingly drawn psychological characterizations, and a plot unwilling to be second-guessed distinguish this from other gothic novels. Simon Vance's performance keeps listeners attentive as the lengthy narrative puts all the pieces into play. Vance navigates the crumbling hallways of an English country estate, The Hundreds, taking listeners into the drawing rooms and parlors of the Ayers family. He becomes the first-person narrator, Dr. Faraday, the observer and interpreter of a series of hellish happenings. Vance creates an aura of menace as Faraday watches while, one by one, the family is destroyed by an eerie presence in the house. By the close of the book, listeners will wonder if the devastating events were supernatural or sinister. Choice listening. S.J.H. © AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

From The Washington Post

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Ron Charles Sarah Waters ain't afraid of no ghost. Her new novel, a deliciously creepy tale called "The Little Stranger," is haunted by the spirits of Henry James and Edgar Allan Poe. Waters is just one turn of the screw away from "The Fall of the House of Usher." Here, once again, a malevolent force moves through a crumbling mansion in which live the final two siblings of a faded great family. And yes, Waters's unbalanced young man is named Roderick, too. This is one of those eerily familiar stories in which a character lit only by candlelight insists, "There's nothing bad here, nothing spooky," and you just know they should all get the hell out of that house. But even though Waters is sewing together the necrotic parts of long-dead literary forms on a dark and stormy night, she keeps the lightning flashing in every gloomy chapter, and you can't help but gasp, "It's alive!" What saves "The Little Stranger" from sinking into a fetid swamp of cliche is the author's restraint, her ability, like James's, to excite our imagination through subtle suggestion alone. The supernatural creaks and groans that reverberate through this tale are accompanied by malignant strains of class envy and sexual repression that infect every perfectly reasonable explanation we hear. The result is a ghost story as intelligent as it is stylish. I'm not giving anything away by reminding you to keep your eyes on the narrator. Dr. Faraday is a priggish middle-aged bachelor who describes these peculiar events with a pose of scientific rationalism and "a sense of desperate regret -- almost with guilt." He has a vivid memory of visiting the grand Hundreds Hall as a child in 1919, and so when he's called back to the rural Warwickshire estate almost 30 years later to treat one of the servants, he's shocked by its decrepitude. "The house was collapsing," he notes with dismay, "like a pyramid of cards." The once large staff has been reduced to just one teenage girl, who's faking a stomachache in hopes of being fired from this creepy place. Waters conjures up everything in "The Little Stranger" elegantly, but what's most fascinating is her portrayal of Faraday. The son of poor laborers, he develops a complicated response to Hundreds Hall and the Ayreses, the withering family of aristocrats riding it into the grave. He's flattered to be called into their home and consulted as an expert, but he also feels the embarrassment of his humble origins, the "absurd sense of gaucheness, and falseness." Even standing in their parlor, enjoying their liquor, flirting with the daughter, he suddenly realizes, "I looked more than ever like a balding grocer." The response to "The Little Stranger" will be a little different in this country than in England, where Waters lives. Because Americans persist in pretending we have no class system, we've never developed the Brits' vocabulary of duty, expectation, resentment and adoration that's so central to the themes of this macabre novel. (In one particularly dire moment, Dr. Faraday says, "It's as if -- well, as if something's slowly sucking the life out of the whole family," and a friend replies, "It's called a Labour Government.") Also, English readers may remember seeing impressive estates like Hundreds Hall broken up, turned into museums or even bulldozed into suburbia. For Faraday such a transformation would be an unthinkable tragedy, and the Ayreses act as though they can forestall the inevitable. "They seem to pride themselves on living like the Brontës out there," a man in town observes. They carry on "gaily at gentry life," even while furtively reusing postage stamps. The son, Roderick, has returned from the war with some nasty burns and a bad limp, but feels the "awful pressure" of rebuilding the estate without nearly enough money. Hundreds Hall is an almost hermetically sealed world of lost gentility . . . if only the rot could be arrested. Dozens of rooms are permanently closed off, "dead as paralysed limbs." Over the stable door is a broken clock set to 8:40 -- a wry reference to Dickens's Miss Havisham. "I had slipped into some other, odder, rather rarer realm," Faraday notes with a mixture of rapture and alarm. Adoring the house and eager to ingratiate himself with its tattered owners, Faraday sublimates his envy into deep concern for their welfare, a psychological state that calls to mind Patricia Highsmith's clever psychopath, Tom Ripley. Soon, horrible mishaps start taking place, emergencies that make the Ayreses grateful that the talented Dr. Faraday is so close at hand. But don't get the impression that psychology alone can explain what's happening in this doomed house. Confronted with these weird events, Freud himself would have to admit that sometimes a demon-possessed cigar is just a demon-possessed cigar. Hundreds Hall is full of inexplicable sounds, fluttering shadows, burn marks on the walls, a beloved pet suddenly turned vicious and -- most grotesque of all -- "ordinary things . . . come to crafty, malevolent life." What are we dealing with here? Hysteria? Evil spirits? A jealous doctor? Waters teases us with clues that send us running off in every direction: psychological, paranormal and socioeconomic. But the story's sustained ambiguity is what keeps our attention, and her perfectly calibrated tone casts an unnerving spell over these pages. As Dr. Faraday correctly notes, "In any other setting, such a story would have struck me as farcical." A century ago, Henry James said he'd been inspired to write "The Turn of the Screw" by the disappointment among his literary friends that "the good, the really effective and heart-shaking ghost-stories . . . appeared all to have been told, and neither new crop nor new type in any quarter awaited us." He needn't have feared that. We've enjoyed 100 years of fantastic horror writing in myriad crops and types. But here Waters has made the old bones dance again.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1, Part 1

I first saw Hundreds Hall when I was ten years old. It was the summer after the war, and the Ayreses still had most of their money then, were still big people in the district. The event was an Empire Day fête: I stood with a line of other village children making a Boy Scout salute while Mrs Ayres and the Colonel went past us, handing out commemorative medals; afterwards we sat to tea with our parents at long tables on what I suppose was the south lawn. Mrs Ayres would have been twenty-four or -five, her husband a few years older; their little girl, Susan, would have been about six. They must have made a very handsome family, but my memory of them is vague. I recall most vividly the house itself, which struck me as an absolute mansion. I remember its lovely ageing details: the worn red brick, the cockled window glass, the weathered sandstone edgings. They made it look blurred and slightly uncertain–like an ice, I thought, just beginning to melt in the sun.

There were no trips inside, of course. The doors and French windows stood open, but each had a rope or a ribbon tied across it; the lavatories set aside for our use were the grooms’ and the gardeners’, in the stable block. My mother, however, still had friends among the servants, and when the tea was finished and people were given the run of the grounds, she took me quietly into the house by a side door, and we spent a little time with the cook and the kitchen girls. The visit impressed me terribly. The kitchen was a basement one, reached by a cool vaulted corridor with something of the feel of a castle dungeon. An extraordinary number of people seemed to be coming and going along it with hampers and trays. The girls had such a mountain of crockery to wash, my mother rolled up her sleeves to help them; and to my very great delight, as a reward for her labour I was allowed to take my pick of the jellies and ‘shapes’ that had come back uneaten from the fête. I was put to sit at a deal-topped table, and given a spoon from the family’s own drawer–a heavy thing of dulled silver, its bowl almost bigger than my mouth.

But then came an even greater treat. High up on the wall of the vaulted passage was a junction-box of wires and bells, and when one of these bells was set ringing, calling the parlourmaid upstairs, she took me with her, so that I might peep past the green baize curtain that separated the front of the house from the back. I could stand and wait for her there, she said, if I was very good and quiet. I must only be sure to keep behind the curtain, for if the Colonel or the missus were to see me, there’d be a row.

I was an obedient child, as a rule. But the curtain opened onto the corner junction of two marble-floored passages, each one filled with marvellous things; and once she had disappeared softly in one direction, I took a few daring steps in the other. The thrill of it was astonishing. I don’t mean the simple thrill of trespass, I mean the thrill of the house itself, which came to me from every surface–from the polish on the floor, the patina on wooden chairs and cabinets, the bevel of a looking-glass, the scroll of a frame. I was drawn to one of the dustless white walls, which had a decorative plaster border, a representation of acorns and leaves. I had never seen anything like it, outside of a church, and after a second of looking it over I did what strikes me now as a dreadful thing: I worked my fingers around one of the acorns and tried to prise it from its setting; and when that failed to release it, I got out my penknife and dug away with that. I didn’t do it in a spirit of vandalism. I wasn’t a spiteful or destructive boy. It was simply that, in admiring the house, I wanted to possess a piece of it–or rather, as if the admiration itself, which I suspected a more ordinary child would not have felt, entitled me to it. I was like a man, I suppose, wanting a lock of hair from the head of a girl he had suddenly and blindingly become enamoured of.

I’m afraid the acorn gave at last, though less cleanly than I’d been expecting, with a tug of fibre and a fall of white powder and grit; I remember that as disappointing. Possibly I’d imagined it to be made of marble.

But nobody came, nobody caught me. It was, as they say, the work of a moment. I put the acorn in my pocket, and slipped back behind the curtain. The parlourmaid returned a minute later and took me back downstairs; my mother and I said goodbye to the kitchen staff, and rejoined my father in the garden. I felt the hard plaster lump in my pocket, now, with a sort of sick excitement. I’d begun to be anxious that Colonel Ayres, a frightening man, would discover the damage and stop the fête. But the afternoon ran on without incident until the bluish drawing-in of dusk. My parents and I joined other Lidcote people for the long walk home, the bats flitting and wheeling with us along the lanes as if whirled on invisible strings.

My mother found the acorn, of course, eventually. I had been drawing it in and out of my pocket, and it had left a chalky trail on the grey flannel of my shorts. When she understood what the queer little thing in her hand was, she almost wept. She didn’t smack me, or tell my father; she never had the heart for arguments. Instead she looked at me, with her tearful eyes, as if baffled and ashamed.

‘You ought to know better, a clever lad like you,’ I expect she said.

People were always saying things like that to me when I was young. My parents, my uncles, my schoolmasters–all the various adults who interested themselves in my career. The words used to drive me into secret rages, because on the one hand I wanted desperately to live up to my own reputation for cleverness; and on the other it seemed very unfair, that that cleverness, which I had never asked for, could be turned into something with which to cut me down.

The acorn was put on the fire. I found the blackened nub of it among the clinker, next day. That must have been the last grand year for Hundreds Hall, anyway. The following Empire Day fête was given by another family, in one of the neighbouring big houses; Hundreds had started its steady decline. Soon afterwards the Ayreses’ daughter died, and Mrs Ayres and the Colonel began to live less publicly. I dimly remember the births of their next two children, Caroline and Roderick–but by then I was at Leamington College, and busy with bitter little battles of my own. My mother died when I was fifteen. She had had miscarriage after miscarriage, it turned out, all through my childhood, and the last one killed her. My father lived just long enough to see me graduate from medical school and return to Lidcote a qualified man. Colonel Ayres died a few years later–an aneurism, I think.

With his death, Hundreds Hall withdrew even further from the world. The gates of the park were kept almost permanently closed. The solid brown stone boundary wall, though not especially high, was high enough to seem forbidding. And for all that the house was such a grand one, there was no spot, on any of the lanes in that part of Warwickshire, from which it could be glimpsed. I sometimes thought of it, tucked away in there, as I passed the wall on my rounds–picturing it always as it had seemed to me that day in 1919, with its handsome brick faces, and its cool marble passages, each one filled with marvellous things.

So when I did see the house again–almost thirty years on from that first visit, and shortly after the end of another war–the changes in it appalled me. It was the purest chance that took me out there, for the Ayreses were registered with my partner, David Graham; but he was busy with an emergency case that day, so when the family sent out for a doctor the request was passed on to me. My heart began to sink almost the moment I let myself into the park. I remembered a long approach to the house through neat rhododendron and laurel, but the park was now so overgrown and untended, my small car had to fight its way down the drive. When I broke free of the bushes at last and found myself on a sweep of lumpy gravel with the Hall directly ahead of me, I put on the brake, and gaped in dismay. The house was smaller than in memory, of course–not quite the mansion I’d been recalling– but I’d been expecting that. What horrified me were the signs of decay. Sections of the lovely weathered edgings seemed to have fallen completely away, so that the house’s uncertain Georgian outline was even more tentative than before. Ivy had spread, then patchily died, and hung like tangled rat’s-tail hair. The steps leading up to the broad front door were cracked, with weeds growing lushly up through the seams.

I parked my car, climbed out, and almost feared to slam the door. The place, for so large and solid a structure, felt precarious. No one appeared to have heard me arrive, so after a little hesitation I went crunching over the gravel and gingerly climbed the cracked stone steps. It was a hot, still summer’s day–so windless that when I tugged on the tarnished old brass and ivory bell-pull I caught the ring of it, pure and clear, but distant, as if in the belly of the house. The ring was immediately followed by the faint, gruff barking of a dog.

The barks were very soon cut off, and for another long minute there was silence. Then, from somewhere to my right, I heard the scrape of an irregular footstep, and a moment later the son of the family, Roderick, appeared around the corner of the house. He squinted over at me with some suspicion, until noticing the bag in my hand. Drawing a collapsed-looking cigarette from his mouth he called, ‘You’re the doctor, are you? We were expecting Dr Graham.’

His tone was friendly enough, but had a touch of languor to it; as if he were bored by the sight of me already. I left the steps and went over to him, introducing myself as Graham’s partner, explaining about Graham’s emergency case. He answered blandly, ‘Well, it’s good of you to come out. On a Sunday, too; and such a filthy hot one. Come this way, would you? It’s quicker than going right through the house. I’m Roderick Ayres, by the way.’

We had in fact met before, on more than one occasion. But he’d clearly forgotten that, and as we moved off he gave me his hand for a perfunctory shake. His fingers felt queer against mine, rough as crocodile in some spots, oddly smooth in others: his hands had been burned, I knew, in a wartime accident, along with a good part of his face. The scars aside, he was handsome: taller than me, but, at twenty-four, still boyish and slender. He was dressed boyishly too, in an open-necked shirt, summer trousers, and stained canvas shoes. He walked unhurriedly, and with a noticeable limp.

He said as we went, ‘You know why we called you, I suppose?’

I said, ‘I was told, for one of your maids.’

‘One of our maids! I like that. There’s only the one: our girl, Betty. Some stomach problem, it seems to be.’ He looked dubious. ‘I don’t know. My mother, my sister and I tend to manage without doctors as a rule. We muddle through with colds and headaches. But I gather that neglecting the servants is a capital offence these days; they’re to get better treatment than us, apparently. So we thought we ought to send for someone. Watch your step just here, look.’

He had taken me along a gravelled terrace that ran the length of the north side of the Hall; he indicated a spot where the terrace had subsided, making for treacherous dips and cracks. I picked my way around them, interested to have been given a chance to see this side of the house–but aghast, again, at how badly the place had been allowed to decline. The garden was a chaos of nettle and bindweed. There was a faint but definite whiff of blocked drains. The windows we passed were streaked and dusty; all were closed, and most were shuttered, except for a pair of glass doors that stood open at the top of a set of flying stone steps wound about with convolvulus. They gave me a view of a large untidy room, a desk with a mess of papers on it, an edge of brocade curtain . . . That was all I had time to see. We had reached a narrow service doorway, and Roderick was standing aside to let me pass.

‘Go on, would you?’ he said, gesturing with one of his scarred hands. ‘My sister’s downstairs. She’ll show you to Betty, and fill you in.’

Only later, recalling his injured leg, would I guess that he must not have wanted me to see him struggling with stairs. As it was, I thought his manner rather casual, and I went past him, saying nothing. At once, I heard him crunching quietly away in his rubber-soled shoes.

But I went quietly, myself. This narrow doorway, I had realised, was the one through which my mother had more or less smuggled me, all those years before. I remembered the bare stone stairway it led to, and, following the steps down, I found myself in the dim vaulted passage that had so impressed me then. But here was another disappointment. I had been picturing this passage as something like a crypt or a dungeon; in fact its walls were the glossy cream-and-green of police- and fire-stations, there was a strip of coconut matting on the flagstone floor, and a mop sat sourly in a bucket. Nobody emerged to greet me, but to my right a half-open door offered a glimpse of the kitchen, so I went softly over and looked inside. Yet another damp squib: I found a large, lifeless room with Victorian counters and mortuary surfaces, all brutally scoured and scrubbed. Only the old deal table–the very table, by the look of it, where I had eaten my jellies and ‘shapes’– recalled the excitement of that first visit. It was also the only thing in the room to bear any sign of activity, for there was a small pile of muddy vegetables put out on it, together with a bowl of water and a knife–the water discoloured, and the knife wet, as if someone had recently started the task and been called away.

I stepped back; and my shoe must have creaked, or scuffed against the coconut matting. There came again the gruff excited barking of a dog–alarmingly close, this time–and a second later an elderly black Labrador burst from somewhere into the passage and began hurtling towards me. I stood still with my bag raised while it barked and pranced around me, and soon a young woman appeared behind it, saying mildly, ‘All right, you idiotic creature, that’s enough! Gyp! Enough!–I’m so sorry.’ She drew nearer, and I recognised Roderick’s sister, Caroline. ‘I can’t bear a leaping dog, and he knows it. Gyp!’ She reached forward to give him a swipe upon his haunches with the back of her hand; and at that he subsided.

‘Little imbecile,’ she said, tugging his ears with a look of indulgence. ‘It’s touching really. He thinks every stranger’s come to cut our throats and make off with the family silver. We haven’t the heart to tell him the silver’s all been popped. I thought we were getting Dr Graham. You’re Dr Faraday. We’ve never been properly introduced, have we?’

She smiled as she spoke, and offered me her hand. Her grip was firmer than her brother’s had been, and more sincere.

I’d only ever seen her at a distance before, at county events, or on the streets of Warwick and Leamington. She was older than Roderick, twenty-six or twenty-seven, and I’d regularly heard her referred to locally as ‘rather hearty’, a ‘natural spinster’, a ‘clever girl’–in other words she was noticeably plain, over-tall for a woman, with thickish legs and ankles. Her hair was a pale English brown and might, with proper treatment, have been handsome, but I had never seen it tidy, and just now it fell drily to her shoulders, as if she had washed it with kitchen soap and then forgotten to comb it. Added to that, she had the worst dress sense of any woman I ever knew. She was wearing boyish flat sandals and a badly fitting pale summer dress, not at all flattering to her wide hips and large bosom. Her eyes were hazel, highly set; her face was long with an angular jaw, her profile flattish. Only her mouth, I thought, was good: surprisingly large, well-shaped, and mobile.

I explained again about Graham’s emergency case and the call having been passed on to me. She said, as her brother had, ‘Well, it’s good of you to have come all this way. Betty hasn’t been with us very long; less than a month. Her family live over on the other side of Southam, just too far for us to think of bothering them. The mother, anyway, is by all accounts a bit of a bad lot . . . She started complaining about her stomach last night, and when she seemed no better this morning, well, I thought we ought to make sure. Will you look at her right away? She’s just up here.’

She turned as she spoke, moving off on her muscular legs, and the dog and I followed. The room she took me into was right at the end of the corridor, and might once, I thought, have been housekeeper’s parlour. It was smaller than the kitchen, but like the rest of the basement it had a stone floor and high, stunted windows, and the same drab institutional paint. There was a narrow grate, swept clean, a faded armchair and a table, and a metal-framed bed–the kind which, when not in use, can be folded and raised and tucked out of sight in a cavity in the cupboard behind it. Lying beneath the covers of this bed, dressed in a petticoat or sleeveless nightdress, was a figure so small and slight I took it at first to be that of a child; looking closer, I saw it to be an undergrown teenage girl. She made an attempt to push herself up when she saw me in the doorway, but fell pathetically back against her pillow as I approached. I sat on the bed at her side and said, ‘Well, you’re Betty, are you? My name’s Dr Faraday. Miss Ayres tells me you’ve had a tummy ache. How are you feeling now?’

She said, in a bad country accent, ‘Please, Doctor, I’m awful poorly!’

‘Have you been sick at all?’

She shook her head.

‘Any diarrhoea? You know what that is?’

She nodded; then shook her head again.

I opened up my bag. ‘All right, let’s have a look at you.’

She parted her childish lips just far enough to let me slip the bulb of the thermometer under her tongue, and when I drew down the neck of her nightdress and set the chilly stethoscope to her chest, she flinched and groaned. Since she came from a local family, I had probably seen her before, if only to give her her school vaccination; but I had no memory of it now. She was an unmemorable sort of girl. Her colourless hair was bluntly cut, and fastened with a grip at the side of her forehead. Her face was broad, her eyes wide-spaced; the eyes themselves were grey and, like many light eyes, rather depthless. Her cheek was pale, only darkening slightly in a blush of self-consciousness when I put up her nightdress to examine her stomach, exposing her dingy flannel knickers.

As soon as I placed my fingers lightly on the flesh above her navel, she gave a gasp, crying out–almost screaming. I said soothingly, ‘All right. Now, where does it hurt most? Here?’

She said, ‘Oh! All over!’

‘Does the pain come sharply, like a cut? Or is it more like an ache, or a burn?’

‘It’s like an ache,’ she cried, ‘with cuts all in it! But it’s burning, too! Oh!’ She screamed again, opening her mouth wide at last, revealing a healthy tongue and throat and a row of little crooked teeth.
‘All right,’ I said again, pulling her nightie back down. And after a moment’s thought I turned to Caroline–who had been standing in the open doorway with the Labrador beside her, looking anxiously on–and said, ‘Could you leave me alone with Betty for a minute, please, Miss Ayres?’

She frowned at the seriousness of my tone. ‘Yes, of course.’

She made a gesture to the dog, and took him out into the passage. When the door was closed behind her I put away my stethoscope and thermometer, and closed my bag with a snap. I looked at the pale-faced girl and said quietly, ‘Now then, Betty. This puts me in a ticklish position. For there’s Miss Ayres out there, who’s gone to an awful lot of trouble to try and make you better; and here am I, knowing for a fact that there’s nothing at all I can do for you.’

She stared at me. I said more plainly, ‘Do you think I don’t have more important things to do on my day off than come chasing five miles out of Lidcote to look after naughty little girls? I’ve a good mind to send you to Leamington to have your appendix out. There’s nothing wrong with you.’

Her face turned scarlet. She said, ‘Oh, Doctor, there is!’

‘You’re a good actress, I’ll give you that. All that screaming and thrashing about. But if I want play-acting, I’ll go to the theatre. Who do you think’s going to pay me now, hey? I don’t come cheap, you know.’

The mention of money frightened her. She said with genuine anxiety, ‘I am poorly! I am! I did feel sick last night. I felt sick horrible. And I thought–’

‘What? That you’d like a nice day in bed?’

‘No! You in’t being fair! I did feel poorly. And I just thought–’

And here her voice began to thicken, and her grey eyes filled with tears. ‘I just thought,’ she repeated, unsteadily, ‘that if I was as poorly as that, then–then perhaps I ought to go home for a bit. Till I got better.’

She turned her face from me, blinking. The tears rose in her eyes, then ran in two straight lines down her little girl’s cheeks. I said, ‘Is that what this is all about? You want to go home? Is that it?’–and she put her hands across her face and cried properly.

A doctor sees lots of tears; some more affecting than others. I really did have a heap of chores at home, and was not at all amused to have been dragged away from them for nothing. But she looked so young and pathetic, I let her have the cry out. Then I touched her shoulder and said firmly, ‘Come on now, that’s enough. Tell me what the trouble is. Don’t you like it here?’

She produced a limp blue handkerchief from under her pillow, and blew her nose.

‘No,’ she said, ‘I don’t.’

‘Why not? Is the work too hard?’

She gave a hopeless shrug. ‘The work’s all right.’

‘You don’t do it all by yourself though, surely?’

She shook her head. ‘There’s Mrs Bazeley comes in, every day till three; every day bar Sunday. She does the washing and the cooking, and I does everything else. A man has a go at the gardens, sometimes. Miss Caroline does a bit . . .’

‘That doesn’t sound too bad.’

She didn’t answer. So I pressed on. Did she miss her parents?–

She pulled a face at that idea. Did she miss a boyfriend?–She pulled a worse face at that.

I picked up my bag. ‘Well, I can’t help you if you won’t say.’

And seeing me start to rise, she said at last, ‘It’s just, this house!’

‘This house? Well, what about it?’

‘Oh, Doctor, it in’t like a proper house at all! It’s too big! You have to walk a mile to get anywhere; and it’s so quiet, it gives you the creeps. It’s all right in the daytimes, when I’m working, and Mrs Bazeley’s here. But at night, I’m all on me own. There in’t a sound! I have horrible dreams . . . And it wouldn’t be so bad, but they make me go up and down that set of old back stairs. There’s so many corners, and you don’t know what’s round ’em. I think I shall die of fright sometimes!’

I said, ‘Die of fright? In this lovely house? You’re lucky to have the chance to live here. Think of it like that.’

‘Lucky!’ she said in disbelief. ‘All me friends say I’m mad to have gone into service. They laugh at me, at home! I never get to see no one. I never get to go out. Me cousins’ve all got factory jobs. And I could’ve had one, too–only, me dad won’t let me! He don’t like it. He says the factories make the girls too wild. He says I must stop here for a year first, and learn housework and nice ways. A year! I shall be dead of horror, I know I shall. Either that, or dead of shame. You ought to see the awful old dress and cap they makes me wear! Oh, Doctor, it in’t fair!’

She had made a sodden ball of her handkerchief, and, as she spoke, threw it to the floor.

I leaned and picked it back up. ‘Dear me, what a tantrum . . . A year will pass quickly, you know. When you’re older, it’ll seem like nothing.’

‘Well, I in’t old now, am I!’

‘How old are you?’

‘I’m fourteen. I might as well be ninety, stuck here!’

I laughed. ‘Don’t be silly, come on. Now, what are we going to do about this? I ought to earn my fee somehow, I suppose. Do you want me to say something to the Ayreses? I’m sure they don’t want you to be unhappy.’

‘Oh, they just want me to do me work.’

‘Well, how about if I were to have a word with your parents?’

‘That’s a laugh! Me mam spends half her time out with other fellers; she don’t care where I am. Me dad’s useless. All he does is shout his head off. It’s just shouting and rowing all day long. Then he turns round and takes me mam back, every time! He’s only put me into service so I won’t turn out like her.’

‘Well, why on earth do you want to go home? You sound better off here.’

‘I don’t want to go home,’ she said. ‘I just– Oh, I’m just fed up!’

Her face had darkened, in pure frustration. She looked less like a child now, and more like some faintly dangerous young animal. But she saw me watching her, and the trace of temper began to fade. She grew sorry for herself again–sighing unhappily, and closing her swollen eyes. We sat for a moment without speaking, and I glanced around me at that drab, almost underground room. The silence was so pure, it felt pressurised: she was right, at least, about that. The air was cool, but curiously weighted; one was aware somehow of the great house above– aware, even, of the creeping chaos of nettle and weed that lay just beyond it. I thought of my mother. She was probably younger than Betty when she first went out to Hundreds Hall.

I got to my feet. ‘Well, my dear, I’m afraid we all have to put up with things we don’t much care for, from time to time. That’s called life; and there’s no cure for it. But how about this? You stay in bed for the rest of the day, and we’ll think of it as a holiday. I won’t tell Miss Ayres that you’ve been shamming; and I’ll send you out some stomach mixture–you can look at the bottle and remember how close you came to losing your appendix. But I will ask Miss Ayres if there isn’t a way they can make things a bit more cheerful for you here. And meanwhile, you can give the place another chance. What do you say?’

She gazed at me for a second with her depthless grey eyes; then nodded. She said, in a pathetic whisper, ‘Thank you, Doctor.’

I left her turning over in the bed, exposing the white nape of her neck and the small sharp blades of her narrow shoulders.

The passage was empty when I stepped into it, but, as before, at the sound of the closing door the dog started barking; there was a flurry of paws and claws and he came bowling out of the kitchen. But he came less frantically this time, and his excitement soon subsided, until he was happy to let me pat him and pull his ears. Caroline appeared in the kitchen doorway, wiping her hands on a tea-cloth–working the cloth between her fingers in a brisk, housewifely way. On the wall beyond her, I noticed, there was still that box of call-bells and wires: the imperious little machine designed to summon a staff of servants to the grander realm above.

‘Everything all right?’ she asked, as the dog and I moved towards her.

I said without hesitation, ‘Some slight gastric trouble, that’s all. Nothing serious, but you were quite right to call me in. One can’t be too careful with stomach problems, especially in this weather. I’ll send you over a prescription, and you might as well go easy on her for a day or two . . . But there’s one other thing.’ I had reached her side now, and lowered my voice. ‘I get the idea she’s pretty
homesick. That hasn’t struck you?’

She frowned. ‘She’s seemed all right so far. She’ll need time to settle in, I suppose.’

‘And she sleeps down here at night, I gather, all on her own? That must be lonely for her. She mentioned a set of back stairs, said she finds them creepy–’

Her look cleared, grew almost amused. ‘Oh, that’s the trouble, is it? I thought she was above nonsense like that. She seemed a sensible enough thing when she first came out here. But you can never tell with country girls: they’re either hard as nails, wringing chickens’ necks and so on; or going off into fits, like Guster. I expect she’s seen too many unpleasant films. Hundreds is quiet, but there’s nothing queer about it.’

I said, after a second, ‘You’ve lived here all your life, of course. You couldn’t find some way to reassure her?’

She folded her arms. ‘Start reading her bed-time stories, perhaps?’

‘She’s awfully young, Miss Ayres.’

‘Well, we don’t treat her badly, if that’s what you’re thinking! We pay her more than we can afford. She eats the same food as us. Really, in lots of ways she’s better off than we are.’

‘Yes,’ I answered, ‘your brother said something like that.’

I spoke coldly, and she coloured, not very becomingly, the blush rising into her throat and struggling patchily across her dry-looking cheeks. She turned her gaze from mine, as if in an effort to hold on to her patience. When she spoke again, however, her voice had softened a little.

She said, ‘We’d do a great deal to keep Betty happy, if you want to know the truth. The fact is, we can’t afford to lose her. Our daily woman does what she can, but this house needs more than one servant, and we’ve found it almost impossible to get girls in the past few years; we’re just too far from the bus routes and things like that. Our last maid stayed three days. That was back in January. Until Betty arrived, I was doing most of the work myself . . . But I’m glad she’s all right. Truly.’

The blush was fading from her cheek, but her features had sunk slightly and she looked tired. I glanced over her shoulder, to the kitchen table, and saw the heap of vegetables, now washed and peeled. Then I looked at her hands, and noticed for the first time how spoiled they were, the short nails split and the knuckles reddened. That struck me as something of a shame; for they were rather nice hands, I thought.

She must have seen the direction of my gaze. She moved as if self-conscious, turning away from me, making a ball of the teacloth and tossing it neatly into the kitchen so that it landed on the table beside the muddy tray. ‘Let me take you back upstairs,’ she said, with an air of bringing my visit to a close. And we mounted the stone steps in silence–the dog going with us, getting under our feet, sighing and grunting as he climbed.

But at the turn of the stairs, where the service door led back on to the terrace, we met Roderick, just
coming in.

‘Mother’s looking for you, Caroline,’ he said. ‘She’s wondering about tea.’ He nodded to me. ‘Hullo, Faraday. Did you reach a diagnosis?’

That ‘Faraday’ grated on me somewhat, given that he was twenty-four and I was nearly forty; but before I could answer, Caroline had moved towards him and looped her arm through his.

‘Dr Faraday thinks we’re brutes!’ she said, with a little flutter of her eyelids. ‘He thinks we’ve been forcing Betty up the chimneys, things like that.’

He smiled faintly. ‘It’s an idea, isn’t it?’

I said, ‘Betty’s fine. A touch of gastritis.’

‘Nothing infectious?’

‘Certainly not.’

‘But we’re to take her breakfast in bed,’ Caroline went on, ‘and generally spoil her, for days and days. Isn’t it lucky I know my way about the kitchen? Speaking of which–’ She looked at me properly now. ‘Don’t run away from us, Doctor. Not unless you have to. Stay and have some tea with us, will you?’

‘Yes, do stay,’ said Roderick.

His tone was as limp as ever; but hers seemed genuine enough. I think she wanted to make up for our disagreement over Betty. And partly because I wanted to make up for it too–but mainly, I must admit, because I realised that in staying to tea I’d be able to see more of the house–I said I would. They moved aside for me to go on ahead of them. I went up the last few steps and emerged in a small, bland hallway, and saw the same baize-curtained arch to which I’d been led by the kindly parlourmaid in 1919. Roderick came slowly up the stairs, his sister with her arm still looped through his, but at the top she moved away from him and casually drew the curtain back. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Review

Waters (The Night Watch) reflects on the collapse of the British class system after WWII in a stunning haunted house tale whose ghosts are as horrifying as any in Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House. Doctor Faraday, a lonely bachelor, first visited Hundreds Hall, where his mother once worked as a parlor maid, at age 10 in 1919. When Faraday returns 30 years later to treat a servant, he becomes obsessed with Hundreds's elegant owner, Mrs. Ayres; her 24-year-old son, Roderick, an RAF airman wounded during the war who now oversees the family farm; and her slightly older daughter, Caroline, considered a "natural spinster" by the locals, for whom the doctor develops a particular fondness. Supernatural trouble kicks in after Caroline's mild-mannered black Lab, Gyp, attacks a visiting child. A damaging fire, a suicide and worse follow. Faraday, one of literature's more unreliable narrators, carries the reader swiftly along to the devastating conclusion.
- Publishers Weekly Starred review --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Review

Waters (The Night Watch) reflects on the collapse of the British class system after WWII in a stunning haunted house tale whose ghosts are as horrifying as any in Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House. Doctor Faraday, a lonely bachelor, first visited Hundreds Hall, where his mother once worked as a parlor maid, at age 10 in 1919. When Faraday returns 30 years later to treat a servant, he becomes obsessed with Hundreds's elegant owner, Mrs. Ayres; her 24-year-old son, Roderick, an RAF airman wounded during the war who now oversees the family farm; and her slightly older daughter, Caroline, considered a "natural spinster" by the locals, for whom the doctor develops a particular fondness. Supernatural trouble kicks in after Caroline's mild-mannered black Lab, Gyp, attacks a visiting child. A damaging fire, a suicide and worse follow. Faraday, one of literature's more unreliable narrators, carries the reader swiftly along to the devastating conclusion.
- Publishers Weekly Starred review

--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

From Booklist

Waters’ darkly atmospheric fifth novel is set at a decaying mansion in postwar England. The narrator, Dr. Faraday, first visited Hundreds Hall as a child, when his mother, a servant at the great manor, brought him there for a party. Nearly three decades later, he returns on a professional call and soon finds himself growing close to the owners: the widowed Mrs. Ayers, who has never gotten over the death of her oldest daughter, and her two adult children, Caroline and Roderick. Faraday treats Roderick’s war injury but watches helplessly as the young man, who is convinced there is an evil presence in the house, slides into madness. After a devastating incident involving a young neighbor, Faraday finds he has no choice but to commit Roderick to a mental institution. Faraday finally faces the feelings he’s developed for Caroline, but the malevolent force shadowing Hundreds Hall hasn’t finished with the Ayers family yet. An eerie ghost story mixed with piercing class commentary, Waters’ latest is downright haunting. --Kristine Huntley --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

About the Author

Sarah Waters is the author of Tipping the Velvet, a New York Times Notable Book; Affinity, which won her the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award; Fingersmith; and The Night Watch, both of which were shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the Man Booker Prize. She has also been named one of Granta's best young British novelists. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0023EFB32
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Riverhead Books (March 31, 2009)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 31, 2009
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 4882 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 492 pages

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Sarah Waters is the bestselling author of Tipping the Velvet, Affinity, Fingersmith, and The Night Watch. Winner of many literary awards, she has been shortlisted for both the Man Booker and Orange Prizes. She lives in London.

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Katherine Y

An engaging, well-written gothic novel

Reviewed in the United States on November 12, 2021

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It’s a pleasure to find a standout gothic novel featuring a chilling story and fine writing with nods to Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Perkins, Henry James, and Edgar Allan Poe stories. This novel does it all with an immersive plot that will make it difficult for readers to sleep at night. The setting is the late 1940’s Warwickshire, England. Sarah Water’s central theme is the deterioration of an old aristocratic family and an old house that seems to be haunted.
World War II has greatly strained families, even those who live on great estates and come from distinguished ancestors, like the Ayres. The matriarch, a widow named Mrs. Ayres, is an increasingly frail woman who relies on her grown son, Roderick, to manage her affairs and those of the estate, a mansion called Hundreds Hall. Roderick is suffering from a war wound inflicted when he was in a plane crash. He has a pronounced limp. Caroline, the daughter, is a plain sort of woman who is often seen roaming over the estate grounds in sturdy boots with the old Labrador, Gyp, by her side.
Dr. Faraday, a local GP, visits Hundreds Hall when he is called to attend to the fourteen-year-old new housemaid, Betty, who has fallen ill. Betty has a stomach upset which Faraday immediately realizes is faked. In confidence, Betty confides to Faraday that the house frightens her. She has seen moving shadows and hears odd sounds, and is convinced the house is haunted. She wants to go home. Faraday promises not to reveal her malingering if she will promise to give her job another try. Betty agrees.
Faraday becomes a friend to the family and helps them in their reduced circumstances. He is also a confidante to Caroline, who is twenty years his junior. When the Ayres family invites him to a small dinner for the new neighbors, he goes. The dinner is a disaster. Having brought their young daughter, the newcomers are outraged when the always calm and patient Gyp bites the girl. Trouble after trouble besets the Ayres after this. Roderick sees his dresser mirror moving toward him unaided. He becomes paranoid and afraid to sleep in his room. Faraday ends up committing Roderick to an institution. Inexplicable and sinister happenings continue in the house. Faraday, who has become involved with Caroline, can seem to do nothing to stop it.
The story is told in an old-fashioned linear way. There are no jumps in time nor multiple point-of-view characters, but it is an engaging and well-written read. It’s the best haunted house story I’ve read in a while. Literature majors will delight in the oblique references to classic suspense novels. Everyone else will enjoy a chilling well-told gothic tale.

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S. Schell

Intrigues But Doesn't Scare

Reviewed in the United States on October 25, 2010

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Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, "The Little Stranger" accrued positive reception from critics when it was released in May of 2009 - quotes ranged from describing it as "deliciously creepy" to "a terrific, chilling read you can get lost in". Even Stephen King weighed in, saying "several sleepless nights are guaranteed". If by "sleepless nights" King meant the scares it offers will keep a reader awake most of the night in a state of nervous tension, he is wrong. Though it is an interesting and elegantly told story about the possibility (not confirmation) of a malevolent spirit causing a family distress, it does not come close to the disturbing depictions and scenarios a horror novel offers (especially his). The "scares" contained herein are of an insidious nature- what the reader is offered instead of aggressive and demonic aura is a slow and delicious build, a grand tease, the reader strung along to the very end. So if by "sleepless nights" King meant that the story hooks a reader with such urgency that sleep is sacrificed to finish that paragraph, that chapter (and chapters are LONG, averaging about 30 pages each) or perhaps the entire book, then he is not far off the mark.

British author Sarah Waters (Tipping The Velvet) brings things full circle for the character of Dr. Faraday, the voice of the book. Though never having lived within the walls of Hundreds Hall, an 18th century Georgian estate in his hometown of Warwickshire, Faraday has a long and curious history with the house, beginning when he is 10 years old. Returning 30 years later on a call to examine a young housemaid, he is disheartened by Hundreds's fall into disrepair and his once innocent fascination with the place begins to border on obsession, Faraday becoming an integral part of a strange and tragic history for the Ayres family.

It is through his eyes that we see Hundreds' distraught occupants. There is Angela Ayres, the matriarch, described as lovely and old-fashioned; Roderick, her son and a war veteran who has returned from combat, his psychological scars more prominent than the physical; and Caroline, her 27-year old daughter who cares nothing of her spinster status and runs free and barefoot about the property like a tomboy, her dog Gyp two steps behind. Faraday awkwardly falls into their lives and once he bridges the gap from family physician to family friend and begins courting Caroline, he is without escape from the "taint" of which both the Ayres children are convinced has taken hold of the family.

Before I started reading "The Little Stranger", I went to Amazon.com's product page and took a brief glimpse of its customer reviews. The average review was 3.5 stars (out of a possible 5), a substandard score that suggested that many people who read it found that it didn't meet their expectations. I went into this novel expecting what most people did: a ghost story, a narrative that focused on a frightening haunt. What I got instead was something literary rather than plot-driven, an examination on the effects of modernization (Waters never intended to write a ghost story; she was exploring "the rise of socialism in the UK and how the fading gentry dealt with losing their legacies"), familial hardship and tragedy, and possibly the author's supposition on where the paranormal comes from through a theory offered by a character named Seeley.

The book is best read at long stretches - those who drift in and out frequently due to lack of time will become disinterested quickly due to Waters's painstaking build (it takes over 100 pages before anything untoward happens at Hundreds). Characters are irksome - Caroline bothered me at times, her emotional restraint bordering on detachment and frigidity. I began to wish as much as Faraday did that she would just let go and let herself be loved by him and I became as frustrated with her as he did when his gentle advances were rebuffed time and time again. But Faraday is transparent - Caroline's insinuation that he wants a marriage in order to possess the house isn't just paranoid accusation and in the end he gets what he subconsciously longed for at great price. Nonetheless, Waters is a masterful storyteller and it is because of her capabilities as both a raconteur and an astute craftswoman of prose that I award her book a 4-star rating. If not for my diminished expectation of plot and the deliberate pace, it would've had 5.

Bottom line: Do not go into "The Little Stranger" thinking you will get a straightforward story about frightening apparitions and disembodied voices, the kinds of in-your-face scares that most people look for this time of year. This is, much like Shirley Jackson's "The Haunting of Hill House" before it, a tale of psychological terror, one that picks away slowly and agonizingly at the sanity of its characters. Waters will pick at your imagination, stealing it well into the wee hours that you'll be reading.

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LIL

Moving and creepy

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 8, 2024

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Great characterisation, you really care about the fate of the main characters.
The description of the deterioration of Hundreds is so well done, as is the atmosphere caused by various incidents.
The ending really leaves the reader to decide what was the cause of the tragic events that took place.

Client Kindle

Haunting read

Reviewed in France on May 19, 2023

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One of the creepiest and most original haunted house story out there. The writing is very clever, with subtle hints leading you to the overwhelming end.

Corina Furtado

Excellent book

Reviewed in Brazil on December 31, 2019

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Very gripping a novel! It keeps a mysterious tone all along, with an ending far from boring, specially coherent. It's common for writers to try to give you that ONE PLOT TWIST and then damage the whole story. Sarah Waters does far from that. I really appreciated the book!

Amazon Customer

Perfect!

Reviewed in Canada on March 1, 2019

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Absolutely amazing! I couldn’t stop reading! Sarah Waters is such a descriptive writer, it’s like watching a movie in your head while you’re reading this book. You know exactly what the characters look like, how they are feeling and everything around them. The story line is a little slow at first, but then speeds up and gets scary! My first ever “ghost story” read, and I will definitely compare all other ghost stories to this one. Absolutely incredible!

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