Book Review: Whickering Place

Title: Whickering Place

Author: London Clarke

Date: 2019

Publisher: Carfax Abbey

ISBN: 978-1393470373

Quote: "Agoraphobia is hard enough to overcome on its own, but you've made some great strides this past year."

Avery's therapist is encouraging her to move to the house where her father died, Whickering Place. Her father behaved somewhat strangely after moving there; he's thought to have committed suicide. So, maybe Dr. Murphy believes in the flooding technique for overcoming irrational fears? Whatever. Within a few days, Avery won't know whether she's more afraid of leaving her new home or of staying in it.

The place really does, in its fictive reality, whicker. There are thumping and slithering sounds as if a succubus, a massive snake with a woman's head and arms, lives in the attic. There are bats, too. There is an oldfashioned phone that rings and replays creepy voices. There are mysterious toy coins that turn up in the house and around town, frequently before or after a murder. There are evil spirits who take over the narrative at times, who whisper people's names at night just to scare them.

The town is a fictional world's version of Asheville, where, London Clarke assures us, there is no history of a vampire cult in the real world. 

A few trigger warnings are in order. Teenagers can probably handle the squick level in this book, but adults probably won't want to recommend it to them, or seem to recommend it by letting them catch us reading it. (Hello, younger Nephews? You did not see your Auntie Pris reading this book. You can't be sure someone else is not writing this review.) Avery has a gun--before hospitalization for post-traumatic stress, she was training to be a police officer--and, before the story's over, she will shoot homicidal maniacs to save lives. Avery was a virgin, still getting to know her very first boyfriend when they were shot and he didn't survive, and she's not felt like dating anyone else until she meets the two attractive brothers who are renting rooms in Whickering Place. In the course of the book she will marry one of them and enjoy a proper honeymoon. Before the final page she'll be living alone with the other one, not really as a wife but letting people think she is, waiting to find out whether the one she's married is dead, alive, or maybe undead. The dominant visual image throughout this book is blood, some of it shed consensually in vampire cult meetings, much of it spilled during homicides, some of which are committed by sympathetic characters.

If you enjoy that kind of story, you'll love Whickering Place. Please understand that many people who are brave in real life, including doctors (like one of the brothers) who've worked in emergency rooms and seen this kind of gore on a daily basis, just don't enjoy reading a full-length book about it. 

Bonus for some readers: This novel is part of a series that began with Pearse, previously reviewed here, and describes just how the cult are continuing to use and abuse Pearse Gallagher. Avery will taste Pearse's blood in this story.