Five Stories High: One House, Five Hauntings, Five Chilling Stories by Jonathan Oliver
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
The five novellas in this collection all tell stories either centered around or at least featuring (sometimes very tangentially) the Gothic residence known as Irongrove Lodge, with narrative bridges connecting the stories together in a manner of sorts.
Irongrove Lodge is a nasty old place, full of tortured ghosts and malevolence that drives its occupants to madness and worse. Its many victims prove that a good design treatment on a hell house just leaves you with a nicer-looking hell house.
I enjoyed four of the five stories quite a bit, while one of them left me a bit unmoved. The linking narrative also didn’t really click for me and probably could have been excised altogether. The passages are brief enough that you can get through them quickly, though.
“Maggots” features a protagonist who may be afflicted by imposter syndrome–or his aunt could actually be taken over by some alien entity. It’s appropriately weird and yet thoroughly grounded at the same time. At one point Will, the young man who feels he may be standing precariously on the edge between worlds, writes down possible explanations for what he perceives as his aunt’s strange behavior, ending with “I have lost my mind.” The whole thing is enjoyable in how the characters behave and react in the most ordinary of ways to to each other and events both mundane and…less so.
“Priest’s Hole” is about a man who discovers he can shape-shift thanks to a rather special room in Irongrove Lodge. He ends up with an agent he never sees who finds him jobs and it gets complicated and messy from there. The shape shifter narrates the story and frequently apologizes for being melodramatic and stupid. It’s a neat take on shape-shifting.
“Gnaw” is a straight-up ghost story, in which a young family moves into Irongrove Lodge, the husband determined to remodel it and make it a home for his wife and two children. Various ghosts and ghost-like entities have other plans, most of them violent and disturbing. The remodeling does not go well. This is one of those tales in which you will find yourself constantly muttering to yourself, “Why won’t they leave?!” but still manages to keep on the side of the characters behaving believably.
“The Best Story I Could Manage Under the Circumstances” is a surreal trip through magically-appearing doors in bedroom walls and ceilings, in which a young boy is ensnared by a demented storyteller. The whole thing is presented in a very droll manner, as a kind of modern fairy tale, and while it is a triumph of style, I found I didn’t care about the characters and nearly stopped caring about how things would turn out. If this style works for you, however, it may make your socks roll up and down in delight. My socks didn’t really move much.
The final story, “Skin Deep” is told as a series of vignettes from the perspectives of those involved, a format author Sarah Lotz used to good effect in her novel The Three and again uses skillfully here. This is another remodeling-gone-amok tale, in which a May-December couple moves into one of the flats at Irongrove Lodge, where Robin, the younger of the two, becomes obsessed with redecorating the place to the detriment of his wife’s bank account, their marriage and his sanity. The remodeling again does not go well, though the cleaners manage to get most of the nastiest stuff cleaned up.
Given the subject matter of most stories, the tone in the majority of them is surprisingly light, yet with the exception of “The Best Story…” the presentation never feels glib. “The Best Story” is all about being glib and weird and gross (you may not want to pass along this story to someone expecting a baby–trust me on this).
While I would overall recommend Five Stories High,/> the marketing of it is deceptive, as only two of the stories are really ghost stories at all. They also happen to be the only two that really make Irongrove Lodge a significant part of the narrative, rather than something shoehorned in to technically fit the theme of the collection.
