Book Review: Nocturne House

Title: Nocturne House

Author: London Clarke

Date: 2020

ISBN: 978-1393140283 

Quote: "If the woman in the hospital is Laura, you will find her very changed."

Laura Massabrook does a lot of changing in this novel. More, I suspect, than a real human could survive. 

She's been labelled bipolar, a mental illness that's hard to define and often used as a way to discredit normal young people...as it might be by abusers, or exploitative institutions. Laura may actually have a physically based mood disorder. In the hospital she's predictably unhappy about having her symptoms mis-medicated with drugs that produce unpleasant physical effects. But then she meets a wonderful new doctor who wants to help her reframe her moods as the "empowerment" and "beautiful sorrow" of a brilliant mind. Laura has given no evidence of a brilliant mind, of any talent for leadership or entrepreneurship or "creativity," but trying to become something she probably is not has to be preferable to being legally doped to death...right?

Er, um...the alternative being presented to Laura is the vampire cult that ran Whickering Place and employs Pearse. (The series is a trilogy with a prequel; I've not reviewed them in order because I've not received them in order. Nocturne House is volume three.) 

The vampires in this novel are mostly the kind we sometimes find in real life: human beings who are excited by the idea of drinking other people's blood. They're not "undead," but they think they'd like to be. They consume large amounts of blood: some pilfered from hospitals, some drained from more or less consensual victims at their parties, some exchanged with one another. They also prostitute women and children. Their cult is dominated by abusive men, but promotes a few women to "leadership positions" where they help the men torture and kill other women. Nocturne House also seems to be occupied by ghosts and demons; Laura sees them, but then Laura is coming off a lot of drugs.

The squick level is high. There's a lot of blood and violence, suicide and murder, with quite a few moldering corpses as evidence that can help Laura,, her husband, Pearse, his wife, and law enforcement personnel deal with most of the cult's leaders by legal means. The mood in this novel alternates between terror and gross-outs with no contrasting wholesome scenes for the reader's relief; it's not an emotional roller coaster but an emotional deep-sea dive.

What I didn't like, although I can imagine it being what some readers will like, is the moral ambiguity of Laura's character. She doesn't like being drugged. She doesn't trust her mother or her husband, who lovingly send her back to hospitals to be drugged. So in the vampire cult, while still going to "classes" that seem to be standard business school blah-blah, she gets into an adulterous relationship with one of the cult leaders who seems to be nicer than the others. Of course he's not nice and, in order to break off the adulterous relationship, Laura will have to do things to him that aren't nice either. This is a story where the protagonist does things that certainly aren't virtuous throughout, and her climactic choice is between loyalty to a man who represents absolute evil and loyalty to one who represents self-harm, if not complete self-destruction. So...meh. I like stories where at least one of the alternatives at least some of the characters choose is good, or decent, or natural. 

In the real world there are people who feel that their mental disorders are more unbearable than the effects of drugs intended to damage their brains. Others feel that the drugs and their side effects are more unbearable than the mood swings, "depression," even hallucinations or tremors. There is an industry that wants it to be believed that the first type of mental patients are always closer to sanity than the second type are. Mainly because that industry's motives are so obvious, I'm skeptical about this. I would have felt that the nastiness in this story was justified if it had concluded with some evidence that Laura's mood swings had stabilized, as those of young people often do, and Laura could safely stay off drugs and practice her way to responsible adulthood. 

The writer known as London Clarke says that this kind of "weird, gothy stuff" is reaching some audiences as a good influence. I'll take her word. I don't know whether anyone who feels trapped in situations where all the choices available seem bad reads this web site. If you do, this novel is for you.