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Solace House
Not yet published
Expected 7 May 26In the summer of 1993, broke student Alex Lane joins a team clearing out Solace House, a Victorian mansion bequeathed to the university by a reclusive hoarder called Flayne. The other students are a mixed bunch, but Alex quickly falls into a close friendship with the lively, redheaded Ella.
When the crew begins sorting through piles of junk, they stumble upon Flayne's journals, in which he details his obsession with his missing mother, his discovery of a place called Bewise, and - most mysteriously - his belief in another realm lying parallel to ours, along with coded instructions as to how it might be reached.
As the students delve deeper into the house's secrets, one of them becomes obsessed with deciphering Flayne's strange opus and its promise of another world... and they may be willing to sacrifice everything, and everyone, to get there.
When the crew begins sorting through piles of junk, they stumble upon Flayne's journals, in which he details his obsession with his missing mother, his discovery of a place called Bewise, and - most mysteriously - his belief in another realm lying parallel to ours, along with coded instructions as to how it might be reached.
As the students delve deeper into the house's secrets, one of them becomes obsessed with deciphering Flayne's strange opus and its promise of another world... and they may be willing to sacrifice everything, and everyone, to get there.
600 pages, ebook
Expected publication May 7, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 146 reviews
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Are we dreaming this place, or is this place dreaming us?
This book hits that elusive sweet spot of being a compelling page-turner that is also literate and fluently written. It's one of those books where I can't say much about the plot for fear of spoilers. I will say, though, that the blurb comparison with The Secret History puzzled me. I could see the Piranesi connection though this does something quite different. For me, I was thinking mostly of The Haunting of Hill House, especially the idea of mutual agencies questioned in the quotation above, and the psychological interactions between the house and inhabitants. There's also an M.R. James vibe in the attention to archaeology and artefacts and a visionary quality of William Blake, name-checked in the text. But intertexts are more than the literary with a particular Queen song and painting that reverberate and echo throughout.
On the writing, it's only near to the end that we understand exactly how clever Maclean has been - Nevertheless, there are also places where the slow-burn pace of the storytelling started to drag a little for me: I got to about 50% and it felt like we were still in the set-up. Also not all the characters are particularly well-defined: Malcolm sort of fades away and Ruth has never had much of a role in the story. But the end is tense and intriguing and pulled off well - I love the way the book remains unresolved right to the end and we are left, as readers, to create our own meanings for what we have read - or, even, hold paradoxical and contradictory endings together in our head, which is where I ended up.
Perhaps one of the big clues to my own interpretation was dropped in too early:
Still, this was a book I could barely put down: intriguing, clever, twisting and dark with its esoteric and even philosophical qualities sitting completely comfortably alongside the 'popular' haunted house/supernatural horror elements. And that final section is an unexpected departure that I certainly didn't see coming - a fabulous piece of storytelling!
Many thanks to Atlantic Books for an ARC via NetGalley
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
✰ 3.5 stars ✰
Bummer. I was really hoping for it to be a four-star read. 😣
Loved the prose. It sucks you in. So atmospheric and haunting, visually entrancing. From the ridge to the marshlands to the Solace House, to the mystical realm, it really reeled me in, captivated and bewitched, almost cinematic in it's depiction. Despite its unnecessary length with a bit of repetitiveness, the details were mesmerizing and chilling.👌
Was I high? No, just high on the appeal of expectation where I had to know, I had to see. How I longed for something surreal and macabre to define all that was unseemly and ghastly in this vivid tapestry of seductive illusion.
“I am in a place where no choice is without horror.”
High on the surprise, I went along for the ride where time is uncertainty, and reality is a betrayal in a walled idyll, a strange paradise. But after a while, the drugs dulled my senses, and I entered a state of confusion and perplexity. 🤔 There was no conclusion, just a mirage of ideas that didn't reach a point, leaving it to me to deem what the actual endgame was.
And that sucked. Big time. 🙎🏻♀️ It's bad enough I was in this magical house, but once I escaped, I was not getting anywhere. It left me hollow and empty, without any closure. It's like riding a roller coaster: you're at the peak, and right at the drop-off point, you plummet painstakingly. 😐 There's no thrill of the rush, just a crippling disappointment that the build-up wasn't worth the intrigue.
At least give me a sense of the real issue with his parents? The Annihilator and the Terrible Last Day? I needed some veracity to this tortured experience, a cursed revelation of how our frail, feeble evils are revealed. Had he gone mentally unstable after a tragic, unfortunate accident? 🥺
It was too much speculation for the burgeoning questions to be conclusive, which left me undecided. Dodging the question just as much as Alex avoided giving a concrete answer. 🙄 Meandering, not so much misleading with purposefully disguised details, but ultimately failed to strike a match - for me, anyway.
The tone is laced literally with disguised hokey-ness, I don't know whether to applaud it or be offended that it left me to surmise the true intent behind it.What was real and what was a figment of his imagination serving as a coping mechanism—creating something so unbelievable that the horror allowed him to survive the trauma?
“Labyrinth, yew maze, artful dead ends.
built upon tragedy foreseen.
on ruination - everything depends
on obliterating my dream.”
I applaud the author's poetic talents that displayed plentiful creative ingenuity; however, their inclusion at the start of every chapter became distracting and burdensome. It felt ineffectual and also a little over my head, even when the urge to skip them was ever present. 😕
19yo Alex was a strange MC, unlikeable, duplicitous, insufferable, and almost apathetic, with how his empathy and concern seemed fake. He felt devoid of any real interest in other human beings. His very actions suggested an ulterior motive with a hidden agenda.
The cast did fall under the stereotypical archetypes with very little depth, save to serve as a checklist of perfect inclusion to depict a lifeboat of easy camaraderie that existed over a bleak, terrible summer filled with nightmares, terrors, vivid dreams.
“How precious and precarious is sanity, how fleeting, how utterly unappreciated.”
I would have liked more mysticism than mushrooms—some credulity to the disbelieving nature of the plot, maybe more weight to the mental asylum's tortured history. But, the mushrooms became such a predominant element, that I was no longer fazed. Forget Alex's already crippling psyche, the hallucinations were overwhelming the narrative. 😵💫 And that definitely put my investment on the back burner.
Wow, the more I try to write shorter reviews, the more words escape me. 😅
Long story short: I was gripped by Edwin Flayne's disturbing mystery of horrors, enthralled with the atmospheric vibes and vivid descriptive imagery of - the unreality... the madness... and the strangeness - but left with a feeling of bittersweet disappointment, if not sadness, for failing to leave with a clear understanding of what actually happened. I have theories, but, honestly, it would have been nice to have some clarity on what essentially read like a fever dream, instead. 🥴
“Here is a story, a parable, that can speak only to those who understand.”
Bummer. I was really hoping for it to be a four-star read. 😣
Loved the prose. It sucks you in. So atmospheric and haunting, visually entrancing. From the ridge to the marshlands to the Solace House, to the mystical realm, it really reeled me in, captivated and bewitched, almost cinematic in it's depiction. Despite its unnecessary length with a bit of repetitiveness, the details were mesmerizing and chilling.👌
Was I high? No, just high on the appeal of expectation where I had to know, I had to see. How I longed for something surreal and macabre to define all that was unseemly and ghastly in this vivid tapestry of seductive illusion.
“I am in a place where no choice is without horror.”
High on the surprise, I went along for the ride where time is uncertainty, and reality is a betrayal in a walled idyll, a strange paradise. But after a while, the drugs dulled my senses, and I entered a state of confusion and perplexity. 🤔 There was no conclusion, just a mirage of ideas that didn't reach a point, leaving it to me to deem what the actual endgame was.
And that sucked. Big time. 🙎🏻♀️ It's bad enough I was in this magical house, but once I escaped, I was not getting anywhere. It left me hollow and empty, without any closure. It's like riding a roller coaster: you're at the peak, and right at the drop-off point, you plummet painstakingly. 😐 There's no thrill of the rush, just a crippling disappointment that the build-up wasn't worth the intrigue.
At least give me a sense of the real issue with his parents? The Annihilator and the Terrible Last Day? I needed some veracity to this tortured experience, a cursed revelation of how our frail, feeble evils are revealed. Had he gone mentally unstable after a tragic, unfortunate accident? 🥺
It was too much speculation for the burgeoning questions to be conclusive, which left me undecided. Dodging the question just as much as Alex avoided giving a concrete answer. 🙄 Meandering, not so much misleading with purposefully disguised details, but ultimately failed to strike a match - for me, anyway.
The tone is laced literally with disguised hokey-ness, I don't know whether to applaud it or be offended that it left me to surmise the true intent behind it.What was real and what was a figment of his imagination serving as a coping mechanism—creating something so unbelievable that the horror allowed him to survive the trauma?
“Labyrinth, yew maze, artful dead ends.
built upon tragedy foreseen.
on ruination - everything depends
on obliterating my dream.”
I applaud the author's poetic talents that displayed plentiful creative ingenuity; however, their inclusion at the start of every chapter became distracting and burdensome. It felt ineffectual and also a little over my head, even when the urge to skip them was ever present. 😕
19yo Alex was a strange MC, unlikeable, duplicitous, insufferable, and almost apathetic, with how his empathy and concern seemed fake. He felt devoid of any real interest in other human beings. His very actions suggested an ulterior motive with a hidden agenda.
The cast did fall under the stereotypical archetypes with very little depth, save to serve as a checklist of perfect inclusion to depict a lifeboat of easy camaraderie that existed over a bleak, terrible summer filled with nightmares, terrors, vivid dreams.
“How precious and precarious is sanity, how fleeting, how utterly unappreciated.”
I would have liked more mysticism than mushrooms—some credulity to the disbelieving nature of the plot, maybe more weight to the mental asylum's tortured history. But, the mushrooms became such a predominant element, that I was no longer fazed. Forget Alex's already crippling psyche, the hallucinations were overwhelming the narrative. 😵💫 And that definitely put my investment on the back burner.
Wow, the more I try to write shorter reviews, the more words escape me. 😅
Long story short: I was gripped by Edwin Flayne's disturbing mystery of horrors, enthralled with the atmospheric vibes and vivid descriptive imagery of - the unreality... the madness... and the strangeness - but left with a feeling of bittersweet disappointment, if not sadness, for failing to leave with a clear understanding of what actually happened. I have theories, but, honestly, it would have been nice to have some clarity on what essentially read like a fever dream, instead. 🥴
Want to Read
February 11, 2026Drill a hole in my fucking skull, and force feed this book straight into my temporal lobe.
March 7, 2026
I see what you’re going for and I read it very quickly. Two stars for effort!
However
I’ve previously stated, but the comparison to haunting of hill house is only accurate if you are speaking, specifically, about the 1999 theatrical release featuring Catherine zeta jones in which a guy’s head gets knocked off and which incidentally has a 17% on rotten tomatoes. Genuinely as a 2 hour popcorn experience in the hottest week of July this would be my absolute jam. I’d still find the below items problematic or just plain bad but boy would I have a good time.
It should not be comped to secret history at all, and comparing it to house of leaves is just mean. Like comparing a 20 piece puzzle to a 1000 piece puzzle. I’m sorry this description feels SO mean but despite my misgivings about house of leaves / danielewski I think it’s just wrong to put these two things on the same footing.
And while we are here
-it is fcuked up about women, both caricaturish (jilly and Helen are actively sexist annoying shrill portrayals of women) and profoundly fridgifying ([redacted] is a sexist portrayal of women in the sense of only being sexy and relatable and dead)
-it is fcuked up about albinism that it pretends isn’t albinism. why is the [redacted] of your [redacted] an otherworldly sinister “Strange and Pale” fellow and the vessel for the story’s majority supply of being violent and creepy? You didn’t need the shadow being who reflects your deepest terrors to also be: a disabled person
-it’s briefly but very weird about the ~mystical~ nature of Irish and Romani people, just throwing it in there for why the hell not
-it’s incredible how lazy you can be about the nature of mental illness sorry MADNESS and INSANITY OOOOH spooky and evocative, when you’re trying to do a Lovecraft and please god don’t do a Lovecraft [carving out an exception for The Fisherman which I really really like]
-the main character? He’s shit. Regardless of anything that happens or how crrrrAaaazzzy things get he’s just kind of gross and egotistical in a pedestrian way and I can’t stand him and he is not someone I am enthusiastic about as the center of the mystery
-I just rly don’t think he ever hits the balance between ~Madness~, real cosmic horror, and magic mushrooms — I love the effort to throw the reader violently against one perception or interpretation after the other but it never quite hit the right pitch
-we seem to be entering an era of long novels which could have been half the length. It is okay for books to be 300 pages instead of 500. Concentrate your plot, your sensations, your propulsion in fewer words and you become more powerful than you can imagine. There’s a place for long books I swear but the amount of stuff that happens in this book is not commensurate with its length.
Now to cap off, I’m going to suggest very earnestly and with great encouragement to all my fellow readers: if you got something out of the poetry in this novel please read the canonical and real life romantics. Read the people who inspired this (as evidenced by the meander through a gallery of paintings featuring red headed pre raphaelite muses) You will love them. Their poems will remind you aesthetically of the poetry in this book but oh you can pack so much into the bad boys of Christina Rossetti, Keats and Byron. It’s worth delving into with the spirit of curiosity and melodrama and Deep Philosophy.
Shortest review: honestly flew through it and would love the movie but gosh did it need some work and some slaps in the face.
However
I’ve previously stated, but the comparison to haunting of hill house is only accurate if you are speaking, specifically, about the 1999 theatrical release featuring Catherine zeta jones in which a guy’s head gets knocked off and which incidentally has a 17% on rotten tomatoes. Genuinely as a 2 hour popcorn experience in the hottest week of July this would be my absolute jam. I’d still find the below items problematic or just plain bad but boy would I have a good time.
It should not be comped to secret history at all, and comparing it to house of leaves is just mean. Like comparing a 20 piece puzzle to a 1000 piece puzzle. I’m sorry this description feels SO mean but despite my misgivings about house of leaves / danielewski I think it’s just wrong to put these two things on the same footing.
And while we are here
-it is fcuked up about women, both caricaturish (jilly and Helen are actively sexist annoying shrill portrayals of women) and profoundly fridgifying ([redacted] is a sexist portrayal of women in the sense of only being sexy and relatable and dead)
-it is fcuked up about albinism that it pretends isn’t albinism. why is the [redacted] of your [redacted] an otherworldly sinister “Strange and Pale” fellow and the vessel for the story’s majority supply of being violent and creepy? You didn’t need the shadow being who reflects your deepest terrors to also be: a disabled person
-it’s briefly but very weird about the ~mystical~ nature of Irish and Romani people, just throwing it in there for why the hell not
-it’s incredible how lazy you can be about the nature of mental illness sorry MADNESS and INSANITY OOOOH spooky and evocative, when you’re trying to do a Lovecraft and please god don’t do a Lovecraft [carving out an exception for The Fisherman which I really really like]
-the main character? He’s shit. Regardless of anything that happens or how crrrrAaaazzzy things get he’s just kind of gross and egotistical in a pedestrian way and I can’t stand him and he is not someone I am enthusiastic about as the center of the mystery
-I just rly don’t think he ever hits the balance between ~Madness~, real cosmic horror, and magic mushrooms — I love the effort to throw the reader violently against one perception or interpretation after the other but it never quite hit the right pitch
-we seem to be entering an era of long novels which could have been half the length. It is okay for books to be 300 pages instead of 500. Concentrate your plot, your sensations, your propulsion in fewer words and you become more powerful than you can imagine. There’s a place for long books I swear but the amount of stuff that happens in this book is not commensurate with its length.
Now to cap off, I’m going to suggest very earnestly and with great encouragement to all my fellow readers: if you got something out of the poetry in this novel please read the canonical and real life romantics. Read the people who inspired this (as evidenced by the meander through a gallery of paintings featuring red headed pre raphaelite muses) You will love them. Their poems will remind you aesthetically of the poetry in this book but oh you can pack so much into the bad boys of Christina Rossetti, Keats and Byron. It’s worth delving into with the spirit of curiosity and melodrama and Deep Philosophy.
Shortest review: honestly flew through it and would love the movie but gosh did it need some work and some slaps in the face.
Read
March 10, 2026Solace House (2026) is the follow up to Will Maclean’s excellent debut novel The Apparition Phase (2020) which I loved, so was delighted to get my mitts on a review copy of this one.
Rest assured it’s another high wire winner and a triumph of storytelling. A real slow burn though and one which requires a bit of patience. The pay off is well worth it.
The less you know the better. Suffice to say the start is all atmosphere before it takes flight in the final sections. That said, I found it all really compelling and was immersed from the off.
A strange, multi layered, playful, unsettling, haunting novel. If you enjoy literary horror then this is essential and one that almost demands an instant reread.
4/5
More about Solace House (2026)]...
A brilliant, towering, puzzle-box novel about perfect summers and forbidden knowledge, somewhere in the mad interstice of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and A.S. Byatt’s Possession.
Summer, 1993, and university student Alex Lane finds himself at the end of the summer term, broke and without plans. When offered the chance to join students – including beautiful, mercurial Ella – clearing out Solace House, a Victorian residence left by reclusive hoarder Edwin Flayne, he accepts. Initially the house seems ordinary, if slightly mad. But sorting through junk, they discover Flayne’s journals detailing his obsession with his missing mother, his discovery of strange place Bewise, and his belief in another parallel realm, with coded instructions for reaching it. One of the students becomes increasingly obsessed with the house’s secrets and gaining forbidden knowledge – assuming they’re willing to sacrifice everything and everyone.
Rest assured it’s another high wire winner and a triumph of storytelling. A real slow burn though and one which requires a bit of patience. The pay off is well worth it.
The less you know the better. Suffice to say the start is all atmosphere before it takes flight in the final sections. That said, I found it all really compelling and was immersed from the off.
A strange, multi layered, playful, unsettling, haunting novel. If you enjoy literary horror then this is essential and one that almost demands an instant reread.
4/5
More about Solace House (2026)]...
A brilliant, towering, puzzle-box novel about perfect summers and forbidden knowledge, somewhere in the mad interstice of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and A.S. Byatt’s Possession.
Summer, 1993, and university student Alex Lane finds himself at the end of the summer term, broke and without plans. When offered the chance to join students – including beautiful, mercurial Ella – clearing out Solace House, a Victorian residence left by reclusive hoarder Edwin Flayne, he accepts. Initially the house seems ordinary, if slightly mad. But sorting through junk, they discover Flayne’s journals detailing his obsession with his missing mother, his discovery of strange place Bewise, and his belief in another parallel realm, with coded instructions for reaching it. One of the students becomes increasingly obsessed with the house’s secrets and gaining forbidden knowledge – assuming they’re willing to sacrifice everything and everyone.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Mild spoilers ahead
Solace House's premise was quite interesting. The story follows a group of university students who have been called to clean a remote property over the summer. Once they've settled into their new apartments, they find the diaries and journals of Solace House’s former owner. Some of the students slowly become obsessed with the mystery surrounding the house and its lore.
The first 40% of this novel focuses on Alex, one of the students and our protagonist, showing us his troubled relationship with his friends and family, his need for belonging and, most of all, his naiveté. He is incredibly annoying, but I didn’t mind him as a main character. I enjoyed seeing things from his point of view, even though I felt frustrated by his behaviour at times.
I appreciated the slow pacing. Seeing everyone get to know each other was the best part of this novel. The atmosphere was creepy from the beginning, I felt a sense of dread after each chapter. The creepy atmosphere wasn’t created by something obvious; instead, the author conveyed it with small details. I really liked that.
Around the 50% mark the novel changes completely. The pacing is faster, so many things happen in a short amount of chapters. I would have loved for us to get some answers. There are things in this story that are never properly explained, even though they are important to the story. One of them being the ending.
The twist about Alex was horrible and cheap. The “it was all a dream” chapters completely ruined this book for me. It’s not easy to talk about mental health so I applaud the effort, but the execution completely lost me. It made everything we read up to that point feel pointless. In addition, I would have loved to know more about Alex’s backstory (we get only a few lines about his parents in a 500 pages book). Because we, as readers, barely know anything about Alex’s past, this twist just feels weird.
The characters, aside from Alex, lack depth. Some of them are more characterized than others (see Clive), others are misogynistic caricatures (Helen, christian obsessed with religion; Ruth, emo goth girl; Ella, sexy beautiful pre-Raphaelite looking woman), others barely talk (see Malcolm).
An interesting concept, but I feel like the execution lacked momentum. There were some aspects that I liked but I wanted more.
ARC kindly given by the publisher for free. All opinions are my own
-----------
I’m so disappointed lol. Full RTC.
——————
No one loves a mysterious house full of secrets more than me
Solace House's premise was quite interesting. The story follows a group of university students who have been called to clean a remote property over the summer. Once they've settled into their new apartments, they find the diaries and journals of Solace House’s former owner. Some of the students slowly become obsessed with the mystery surrounding the house and its lore.
The first 40% of this novel focuses on Alex, one of the students and our protagonist, showing us his troubled relationship with his friends and family, his need for belonging and, most of all, his naiveté. He is incredibly annoying, but I didn’t mind him as a main character. I enjoyed seeing things from his point of view, even though I felt frustrated by his behaviour at times.
I appreciated the slow pacing. Seeing everyone get to know each other was the best part of this novel. The atmosphere was creepy from the beginning, I felt a sense of dread after each chapter. The creepy atmosphere wasn’t created by something obvious; instead, the author conveyed it with small details. I really liked that.
Around the 50% mark the novel changes completely. The pacing is faster, so many things happen in a short amount of chapters. I would have loved for us to get some answers. There are things in this story that are never properly explained, even though they are important to the story. One of them being the ending.
The twist about Alex was horrible and cheap. The “it was all a dream” chapters completely ruined this book for me. It’s not easy to talk about mental health so I applaud the effort, but the execution completely lost me. It made everything we read up to that point feel pointless. In addition, I would have loved to know more about Alex’s backstory (we get only a few lines about his parents in a 500 pages book). Because we, as readers, barely know anything about Alex’s past, this twist just feels weird.
The characters, aside from Alex, lack depth. Some of them are more characterized than others (see Clive), others are misogynistic caricatures (Helen, christian obsessed with religion; Ruth, emo goth girl; Ella, sexy beautiful pre-Raphaelite looking woman), others barely talk (see Malcolm).
An interesting concept, but I feel like the execution lacked momentum. There were some aspects that I liked but I wanted more.
ARC kindly given by the publisher for free. All opinions are my own
-----------
I’m so disappointed lol. Full RTC.
——————
No one loves a mysterious house full of secrets more than me
Want to Read
March 24, 2026✨Solace House✨
📖 Bookish Thoughts
I’ll be sharing my full review closer to publication date.
🕯️ What to Expect
• Academic setting
• Victorian mansion
• Friend group
• Obsession
• Parallel world
• Psychological horror
📅 Pub Date: October 13, 2026
📝 Thank you to Grove Atlantic and NetGalley for the advanced copy. All thoughts are my own.
📖 Bookish Thoughts
I’ll be sharing my full review closer to publication date.
🕯️ What to Expect
• Academic setting
• Victorian mansion
• Friend group
• Obsession
• Parallel world
• Psychological horror
📅 Pub Date: October 13, 2026
📝 Thank you to Grove Atlantic and NetGalley for the advanced copy. All thoughts are my own.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
Absolutely stunning
A wild trip
I've never read anything like this before and I doubt I'll read anything like this again. I'm just sad that I won't be able to read it for the first time again. Or, maybe I can . . .
A wild trip
I've never read anything like this before and I doubt I'll read anything like this again. I'm just sad that I won't be able to read it for the first time again. Or, maybe I can . . .
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Thank you to the publisher and to Netgalley for this ARC in exchange for my honest review.
The publisher's blurb comparing Solace House to The Secret History and Piranesi really made me eager to read it. I did fly through the 600 pages fairly quickly since I did like the writing style, but unfortunately the book as a whole fell a little flat and I don't think Solace House is especially reminiscent of either book referenced. Yes, there is a group of fairly reckless students like in TSH, but they aren't as interesting or close-knit. And Solace House doesn't have the same good-heartedness I remember of Piranesi.
Although I liked the initial premise of the book and the general mystery of the house, I didn't like any of the characters- all of them were obsessed with getting high, teasing each other (they were harsh on Helen) and shutting each other out (I didn't like that Alex and Ella were hiding information from the others when they all were supposed to be in on the "mystery?" together). Overall, all of the characters all felt like fairly flat stereotypes.
The two poem stanzas at the start of each chapter, although gothic-feeling and atmospheric, were so verbose and dense that I couldn't get any meaning out of them and I ended up skipping over them every time. I will praise the author for the genius trick he did with the formatting (revealed at the end), but I might have liked it if there had not been so much of the poem right at the start of each chapter- maybe just a couple lines each chapter would have been better, or maybe putting a larger chunk of the poem at the start of each "section" rather than each chapter?
The last 25% or so- I liked the twist, but I don't think I understand everything the author intends me to regarding Adam and Ella (no spoilers). And I don't think we ever got closure on Alex's history with the Annihilator and the Last Day.
Overall I don't know if it needed to be shorter, than 600 pages but I would take out some of the beginning part and add more insight into these characters. The author is obviously very smart but I think we needed a better build-up to the payoff at the end.
The publisher's blurb comparing Solace House to The Secret History and Piranesi really made me eager to read it. I did fly through the 600 pages fairly quickly since I did like the writing style, but unfortunately the book as a whole fell a little flat and I don't think Solace House is especially reminiscent of either book referenced. Yes, there is a group of fairly reckless students like in TSH, but they aren't as interesting or close-knit. And Solace House doesn't have the same good-heartedness I remember of Piranesi.
Although I liked the initial premise of the book and the general mystery of the house, I didn't like any of the characters- all of them were obsessed with getting high, teasing each other (they were harsh on Helen) and shutting each other out (I didn't like that Alex and Ella were hiding information from the others when they all were supposed to be in on the "mystery?" together). Overall, all of the characters all felt like fairly flat stereotypes.
The two poem stanzas at the start of each chapter, although gothic-feeling and atmospheric, were so verbose and dense that I couldn't get any meaning out of them and I ended up skipping over them every time. I will praise the author for the genius trick he did with the formatting (revealed at the end), but I might have liked it if there had not been so much of the poem right at the start of each chapter- maybe just a couple lines each chapter would have been better, or maybe putting a larger chunk of the poem at the start of each "section" rather than each chapter?
The last 25% or so- I liked the twist, but I don't think I understand everything the author intends me to regarding Adam and Ella (no spoilers). And I don't think we ever got closure on Alex's history with the Annihilator and the Last Day.
Overall I don't know if it needed to be shorter, than 600 pages but I would take out some of the beginning part and add more insight into these characters. The author is obviously very smart but I think we needed a better build-up to the payoff at the end.
March 31, 2026
What did I just read? And I mean that in the best way. In Solace House, Will Maclean doesn’t take us by the hand. Instead, we tumble along into the story, and, believe me, we aren’t meant to come out the other side the same. As you may gather, the writing is exquisite - the prose, that is. The poetry - eh. But the poetry is just window dressing. The story begins with a group of university students involved in a cleanup at an old hospital that comes to include Solace House, a mysterious mansion. We are with that small group, isolated as they are, as they come to discover the secrets of Solace House and to find themselves in places of which their minds cannot make sense. This is psychological horror that takes a hard right into cosmic horror. Can you truly believe what your mind is telling you? How do you know what is real? Is it possible that all realities exist all at once? And where does that leave us as humans? Are we truly passengers on this planet or is it possible that we can bend things to our will? This book makes you think. That’s one of the more notable things about this book - the thinking. Another notable thing is that some aspects of the story feel familiar, but you can’t put your finger on it. You can’t see the plot twists coming - well, I saw one or two twists coming, but this book is twisty enough that readers are bound to be surprised. The atmosphere is deliciously gothic - dark, mysterious, and uneasy. I loved it and highly recommend.
I would like to thank Netgalley, Will Maclean, and Grove Atlantic for the opportunity to enjoy this ARC.
All opinions are entirely my own.
I would like to thank Netgalley, Will Maclean, and Grove Atlantic for the opportunity to enjoy this ARC.
All opinions are entirely my own.
Want to Read
February 18, 2026im sorry but it's being compared to THE SECRET HISTORY????? THE SECRET HISTORY...... GOURLLLLLLLLL I've never seen a book being compared to the secret history before and now I have 6 star expectations
paused
April 13, 2026The Secret History meets The Haunting of Hill House
OKAY DON'T THREATEN ME WITH A GOOD TIME !!!
Want to Read
March 22, 2026I've been approved for an eARC of this beauty on NetGalley!!! I'm screaming of happiness. <3
February 28, 2026
Solace House is like one big puzzle where every single room that gets uncovered reveals a small hidden puzzle piece that gets you just a little closer to seeing the full picture. The best part being that only on the last page you find the final piece that suddenly makes everything click.
I’ve never been this impressed by an author before. I want to tell everything that happens just so that anyone might be convinced to read this (and I promise you, if you know what I know you’d pick this book up in a heartbeat) but I can’t, because I’d spoiler the entire plot unfortunately. This is really a book where you need to go in blind to enjoy it to the fullest.
What I can say is that this book reminded me so much of some of my favorite books. The suspense was as masterfully written as Donna Tartt did in The Secret History, mixed with the mystery and complexity of Piranesi while the overall feeling of it really reminded me of If We Were Villains.
You can tell that the author put their all into this book and I’m impressed this only took 5 years to write, because this is insane! Truly a masterpiece.
It’s one of those book that you instantly want to reread once you reach the final sentence. And I know for a fact that reading it for the second time will be an ever better experience.
Anyone who’s interested in a book that includes mystery, cosmic horror, suspense, dark academia and at the end blows your mind… this is it!
Thank you, NetGalley and the publisher, for the arc
I’ve never been this impressed by an author before. I want to tell everything that happens just so that anyone might be convinced to read this (and I promise you, if you know what I know you’d pick this book up in a heartbeat) but I can’t, because I’d spoiler the entire plot unfortunately. This is really a book where you need to go in blind to enjoy it to the fullest.
What I can say is that this book reminded me so much of some of my favorite books. The suspense was as masterfully written as Donna Tartt did in The Secret History, mixed with the mystery and complexity of Piranesi while the overall feeling of it really reminded me of If We Were Villains.
You can tell that the author put their all into this book and I’m impressed this only took 5 years to write, because this is insane! Truly a masterpiece.
It’s one of those book that you instantly want to reread once you reach the final sentence. And I know for a fact that reading it for the second time will be an ever better experience.
Anyone who’s interested in a book that includes mystery, cosmic horror, suspense, dark academia and at the end blows your mind… this is it!
Thank you, NetGalley and the publisher, for the arc
Want to Read
February 26, 2026Got the arc!! This sounds incredible, thank you netgalley 🙏🏻🙏🏻
Read
March 24, 2026This is the kind of novel that doesn’t just tell a story — it builds a maze and hands you the key, daring you to decide whether you really want to unlock the next door.
From the moment Alex steps into Solace House, the tone is unmistakable: off-kilter, charged, quietly ominous. The premise may begin with something almost mundane — a group of university students clearing out a decaying Victorian mansion for summer work — but what unfolds is anything but ordinary. The house is not simply a setting. It breathes. It remembers. It resists being understood.
What makes this novel so compelling is its patience. The first half lingers in dust and debris, in old newspapers and forgotten objects, in the rhythm of students cataloguing a life long past. But beneath that routine, something coils. The journals of Edwin Flayne are the turning point — obsessive, coded, intimate — and once they enter the story, the narrative tightens like a wire. The mystery of a parallel realm is not presented as spectacle, but as possibility. And that subtlety is what makes it unsettling.
The dynamic between the students is sharply drawn without ever feeling exaggerated. Alex, financially precarious and emotionally adrift, feels like the perfect lens through which to witness the unraveling. His connection with Ella adds a current of longing and instability that mirrors the house itself — magnetic, beautiful, and possibly dangerous. Meanwhile, the fractures within the group deepen in believable, human ways as curiosity turns to fixation.
What elevates this novel is its refusal to spoon-feed answers. It invites interpretation. It blurs the boundary between grief and madness, genius and obsession. It asks whether belief can shape reality — or distort it beyond recognition. By the final pages, certainty feels like the most fragile thing of all.
The atmosphere is rich without being overwrought, thoughtful without sacrificing tension. It rewards attention. It lingers. And it leaves you with that rare, delicious discomfort of not being entirely sure what you’ve just witnessed — only that it mattered.
For readers who appreciate layered storytelling, intellectual dread, and the slow tightening of psychological horror, this is a puzzle box worth opening.
Solace House may be neglected, but its secrets are anything but quiet.
From the moment Alex steps into Solace House, the tone is unmistakable: off-kilter, charged, quietly ominous. The premise may begin with something almost mundane — a group of university students clearing out a decaying Victorian mansion for summer work — but what unfolds is anything but ordinary. The house is not simply a setting. It breathes. It remembers. It resists being understood.
What makes this novel so compelling is its patience. The first half lingers in dust and debris, in old newspapers and forgotten objects, in the rhythm of students cataloguing a life long past. But beneath that routine, something coils. The journals of Edwin Flayne are the turning point — obsessive, coded, intimate — and once they enter the story, the narrative tightens like a wire. The mystery of a parallel realm is not presented as spectacle, but as possibility. And that subtlety is what makes it unsettling.
The dynamic between the students is sharply drawn without ever feeling exaggerated. Alex, financially precarious and emotionally adrift, feels like the perfect lens through which to witness the unraveling. His connection with Ella adds a current of longing and instability that mirrors the house itself — magnetic, beautiful, and possibly dangerous. Meanwhile, the fractures within the group deepen in believable, human ways as curiosity turns to fixation.
What elevates this novel is its refusal to spoon-feed answers. It invites interpretation. It blurs the boundary between grief and madness, genius and obsession. It asks whether belief can shape reality — or distort it beyond recognition. By the final pages, certainty feels like the most fragile thing of all.
The atmosphere is rich without being overwrought, thoughtful without sacrificing tension. It rewards attention. It lingers. And it leaves you with that rare, delicious discomfort of not being entirely sure what you’ve just witnessed — only that it mattered.
For readers who appreciate layered storytelling, intellectual dread, and the slow tightening of psychological horror, this is a puzzle box worth opening.
Solace House may be neglected, but its secrets are anything but quiet.
April 11, 2026
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
3.5 stars rounded up.
Freshly finished feeling a bit of whiplash. This was a five star read for me until it wasn’t. Around the 80% mark I started to question everything. It really felt like Alex and Will Maclean both lost their way around there. I feel like I can tell what was written and developed in the grips of COVID versus what was done after normalcy started to return.
This book is atmospheric, beautifully written, and so compelling. I never trusted Alex completely, nor do I think we were meant to, so when the story starts to unravel I felt so frustrated. Why did he say some of those things? Why were some of the characters even in the story. At the end, some of it felt unnecessary or like it went completely over my head - and I just don’t really care which one it is.
This was like the House on Haunted Hill meets Hoarders, with a splash of The Magician’s Nephew.
I had a good creepy time.
3.5 stars rounded up.
Freshly finished feeling a bit of whiplash. This was a five star read for me until it wasn’t. Around the 80% mark I started to question everything. It really felt like Alex and Will Maclean both lost their way around there. I feel like I can tell what was written and developed in the grips of COVID versus what was done after normalcy started to return.
This book is atmospheric, beautifully written, and so compelling. I never trusted Alex completely, nor do I think we were meant to, so when the story starts to unravel I felt so frustrated. Why did he say some of those things? Why were some of the characters even in the story. At the end, some of it felt unnecessary or like it went completely over my head - and I just don’t really care which one it is.
This was like the House on Haunted Hill meets Hoarders, with a splash of The Magician’s Nephew.
I had a good creepy time.
Read
March 6, 2026Keeps you gripped but I have a lot of frustrations.
One is that most of the characters have the same voice. Yes they’re all students so the mixture of bants and self conscious intellectual twaddle is going to be common amongst them but it really read like Ruth, Malcolm, Clyde, Leo and our protagonist were all mouthpieces for a single idea of what that sounds like, not individual people talking to each other. Where characters did have have a distinctive quality though they felt one-note - like holy joe Helen and creepy morose Adam.
Alex suffers from this as a protagonist and from the author’s determination to be coy about various things, especially the tragedy that lies in his past. For instance the setting is not named, even by county, which felt pointless and undermining of a story about a place. It’s hard to form even an immediate picture or sense of Alex’s recent life experience if I don’t know what kind of scenery and university to think of. The time period also isn’t outright said for a long time until it comes as a sudden surprise to hear the year 1993 insisted upon halfway through. Not because I hadn’t intuited this felt like the early 90s but because NOT naming a year had felt kind of pointed, like not naming a location does. It was like the author suddenly realised around halfway what he was going to go at the the and that he’d need to anchor us in a named year for that after all.
The choice to only allude ominously to Alex’s backstory feels a poor one. It means we can’t get a handle on him because to tell us anything at all about his pre-uni life would give the game away. We open with a sense of class and social tension but these qualities don’t really affect him going forward. When details are revealed it isn’t clear what was gained by delaying the information reaching us.
Ultimately, like Apparition Phase, I found the ending too dreamlike and hard to follow to be satisfying.
The thing about a story that wants to be ambiguous is you’ve got to pick what you’re being ambiguous about. Otherwise you have too many variables and it’s all just confusion without anything to track. I honestly don’t even know what questions I’m meant to be asking with this one. I’m kind of looking forward to publication and reviews filling up here to see if other responses help me form even a broad sense of what the ideas at play actually were.
There’s also a bit of what seems like a waste real estate, as it were. Why include the mental hospital setting at all? The students could have stayed living in their mostly empty halls of residence, commissioned from the beginning to clean out the titular house. Having them move to the old hospital with the initial plan to just clear that only for a new plan to come in and the hospital clearance conveniently wrap itself up much quicker than anyone had anticipated doesn’t seem to add anything but needless extra manoeuvring into a situation they could have reached more directly.
And it feels like there’s this slightly ‘writing a screenplay rather than a novel’ issue where every interaction is written with a consistent micro level of detail. Every gesture, reaction, laugh etc accounted for. Scenes Always micro-described so it’s hard to form a macro-picture. No sense of the narrating character forming by way of what he does and doesn’t notice and describe.
So all in all a frustrating book that nonetheless made for an absorbing reading experience while it was ongoing. Great cover though.
One is that most of the characters have the same voice. Yes they’re all students so the mixture of bants and self conscious intellectual twaddle is going to be common amongst them but it really read like Ruth, Malcolm, Clyde, Leo and our protagonist were all mouthpieces for a single idea of what that sounds like, not individual people talking to each other. Where characters did have have a distinctive quality though they felt one-note - like holy joe Helen and creepy morose Adam.
Alex suffers from this as a protagonist and from the author’s determination to be coy about various things, especially the tragedy that lies in his past. For instance the setting is not named, even by county, which felt pointless and undermining of a story about a place. It’s hard to form even an immediate picture or sense of Alex’s recent life experience if I don’t know what kind of scenery and university to think of. The time period also isn’t outright said for a long time until it comes as a sudden surprise to hear the year 1993 insisted upon halfway through. Not because I hadn’t intuited this felt like the early 90s but because NOT naming a year had felt kind of pointed, like not naming a location does. It was like the author suddenly realised around halfway what he was going to go at the the and that he’d need to anchor us in a named year for that after all.
The choice to only allude ominously to Alex’s backstory feels a poor one. It means we can’t get a handle on him because to tell us anything at all about his pre-uni life would give the game away. We open with a sense of class and social tension but these qualities don’t really affect him going forward. When details are revealed it isn’t clear what was gained by delaying the information reaching us.
Ultimately, like Apparition Phase, I found the ending too dreamlike and hard to follow to be satisfying.
The thing about a story that wants to be ambiguous is you’ve got to pick what you’re being ambiguous about. Otherwise you have too many variables and it’s all just confusion without anything to track. I honestly don’t even know what questions I’m meant to be asking with this one. I’m kind of looking forward to publication and reviews filling up here to see if other responses help me form even a broad sense of what the ideas at play actually were.
There’s also a bit of what seems like a waste real estate, as it were. Why include the mental hospital setting at all? The students could have stayed living in their mostly empty halls of residence, commissioned from the beginning to clean out the titular house. Having them move to the old hospital with the initial plan to just clear that only for a new plan to come in and the hospital clearance conveniently wrap itself up much quicker than anyone had anticipated doesn’t seem to add anything but needless extra manoeuvring into a situation they could have reached more directly.
And it feels like there’s this slightly ‘writing a screenplay rather than a novel’ issue where every interaction is written with a consistent micro level of detail. Every gesture, reaction, laugh etc accounted for. Scenes Always micro-described so it’s hard to form a macro-picture. No sense of the narrating character forming by way of what he does and doesn’t notice and describe.
So all in all a frustrating book that nonetheless made for an absorbing reading experience while it was ongoing. Great cover though.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Read
April 3, 2026I’m gonna need to read some reviews cuz what was that ending?
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Durante el verano, Alex, un estudiante universitario sin un hogar al que poder regresar, consigue un trabajo limpiando edificios abandonados para que la universidad pueda valuar las propiedades. Ahí conoce a otros estudiantes que, por alguna razón, no quieren o no pueden irse a casa.
Mientras limpian una casa, que se encuentra en un lugar remoto y tiene una arquitectura muy extraña, encuentran un par de escritos que al principio parecen ser los delirios del hombre que vivió recluido ahí por años.
Nunca he tenido un viaje psicodélico; sin embargo, después de leer este libro, estoy segura de que experimenté alguna versión de eso. La narración es muy inmersiva y hubo partes escalofriantes que disfruté bastante. Definitivamente leeré más de Will Maclean.
Mientras limpian una casa, que se encuentra en un lugar remoto y tiene una arquitectura muy extraña, encuentran un par de escritos que al principio parecen ser los delirios del hombre que vivió recluido ahí por años.
Nunca he tenido un viaje psicodélico; sin embargo, después de leer este libro, estoy segura de que experimenté alguna versión de eso. La narración es muy inmersiva y hubo partes escalofriantes que disfruté bastante. Definitivamente leeré más de Will Maclean.
February 26, 2026
Welcome to Solace House.
In this book you jump into the shoes of Alex Lane, a 19 year old boy who has experienced a mysterious loss from which he is running, and who, with the teenage ennui of someone clawing their way to the end of the school year, introduced as someone who is a bit of a loser - no money, his mate isn't really his mate, didn't get the girl.
He ends up finding housing by agreeing to spend the summer cleaning out an old hospital which is being acquired for school property, and eventually, the attached Victorian mansion, long abandoned and filled to the brim with chaotic amounts of clutter. He is joined by Clive (snarky stoner), Helen (a Christian of the homeschooled stick-in-the-mud variety), Leo (so patient and kind he embarrasses everyone who is mean to him, and we love him for this), Malcom (prettyboy partyboy), Ruth (goth girl mother hen combo), Adam (creepy translucent boy who is first introduced screaming at nothing), and Ella (manic pixie dream girl).
Character:
The characters are very well drawn and some of their banter made me smile in delight at my book. I found the character of Helen particularly endearingly done, because even as she is extremely annoying, and I was wary of her being a 'judgmental stick up the behind Christian', the others take to her with exasperated fondness and do in some regards try to protect her due to her naivete.
I did think some of the characters were slightly underused and could have been cut or brought in more throughout the story. Additionally, I was frustrated at
Structure:
The structure of the story is done with quite a lot of detail. It may be just that I love British writing and how it often meanders and adds excessive levels of detail (and smoking!), but this worked for me. Especially because one of the overarching themes of the story is that creepy Richard Dadd painting, The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke, and how it represents a horror of the absent, and a need for every space to be filled with incredible amounts of detail. Much of the prose I found to draw me fully into Solace House and ground me in a sense of the place. I only noticed a couple of times when an ill-placed or heavy-handed metaphor threw me out of the narrative.
I think the pacing could have been tightened up a little overall. Around halfway through I started to wonder how much more set-up we could possibly get, but then something else would draw me in. It wasn't enough to put me off, but occasionally I found myself speed-reading through paragraphs or scenes which were more transitional.
Most of the time, though, I was absolutely enchanted by the book. I wanted to know what in the world was going on. I attempted to decipher what was going on with the poetry before the big reveal (although I was wrong). I read through car rides and lunches and work.
The ending did somewhat disappoint me. The author leaves a lot up to interpretation as to what is going on, what is true. The very last few paragraphs confounded me and I was left to sit there thinking as to what Maclean could have meant by doing this.
The author does something right off the bat with that I caught right away; it seemed kind of heavy-handedly lobbed into the story as an obvious Chekhov's gun to look for later. I figured I would have an eyeroll later when the curtain was yanked away to reveal something I'd figured out 17% of the way through. But no! The heavy-handedness of the information we were given early on did not, in fact, give me a definitive answer. I kind of liked this, at the same time that it maddened me.
I wish I'd had a slightly more conclusive ending or at least more breadcrumbs left for us to understand what was going on. For that reason alone I deducted a star.
Conclusion:
I don't know if I agree with the comparisons to the Secret History, as the philosophical themes of the story seem to tend more towards the cosmic horror side of things rather than the intersection of beauty and terror. The premise, though -- an evil sentient house; cosmic existentialism; gnostic secret layers of knowledge attained only through enlightenment (does NOT represent my personal views on real life, but a favorite theme of mine); an alien, inhuman future -- were right up my alley.
Thank you also Mr. Maclean for being so staunchly anti-AI. It's the first thing I noticed in the early pages, and so I did kind of go into reading the book thinking it would be about an evil AI-run house. I was pleasantly surprised when it was not.
Thank you to NetGalley and Grove Atlantic for a free ARC in exchange for my honest opinion!
In this book you jump into the shoes of Alex Lane, a 19 year old boy who has experienced a mysterious loss from which he is running, and who, with the teenage ennui of someone clawing their way to the end of the school year, introduced as someone who is a bit of a loser - no money, his mate isn't really his mate, didn't get the girl.
He ends up finding housing by agreeing to spend the summer cleaning out an old hospital which is being acquired for school property, and eventually, the attached Victorian mansion, long abandoned and filled to the brim with chaotic amounts of clutter. He is joined by Clive (snarky stoner), Helen (a Christian of the homeschooled stick-in-the-mud variety), Leo (so patient and kind he embarrasses everyone who is mean to him, and we love him for this), Malcom (prettyboy partyboy), Ruth (goth girl mother hen combo), Adam (creepy translucent boy who is first introduced screaming at nothing), and Ella (manic pixie dream girl).
Character:
The characters are very well drawn and some of their banter made me smile in delight at my book. I found the character of Helen particularly endearingly done, because even as she is extremely annoying, and I was wary of her being a 'judgmental stick up the behind Christian', the others take to her with exasperated fondness and do in some regards try to protect her due to her naivete.
I did think some of the characters were slightly underused and could have been cut or brought in more throughout the story. Additionally, I was frustrated at
Structure:
The structure of the story is done with quite a lot of detail. It may be just that I love British writing and how it often meanders and adds excessive levels of detail (and smoking!), but this worked for me. Especially because one of the overarching themes of the story is that creepy Richard Dadd painting, The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke, and how it represents a horror of the absent, and a need for every space to be filled with incredible amounts of detail. Much of the prose I found to draw me fully into Solace House and ground me in a sense of the place. I only noticed a couple of times when an ill-placed or heavy-handed metaphor threw me out of the narrative.
I think the pacing could have been tightened up a little overall. Around halfway through I started to wonder how much more set-up we could possibly get, but then something else would draw me in. It wasn't enough to put me off, but occasionally I found myself speed-reading through paragraphs or scenes which were more transitional.
Most of the time, though, I was absolutely enchanted by the book. I wanted to know what in the world was going on. I attempted to decipher what was going on with the poetry before the big reveal (although I was wrong). I read through car rides and lunches and work.
The ending did somewhat disappoint me. The author leaves a lot up to interpretation as to what is going on, what is true. The very last few paragraphs confounded me and I was left to sit there thinking as to what Maclean could have meant by doing this.
The author does something right off the bat with that I caught right away; it seemed kind of heavy-handedly lobbed into the story as an obvious Chekhov's gun to look for later. I figured I would have an eyeroll later when the curtain was yanked away to reveal something I'd figured out 17% of the way through. But no! The heavy-handedness of the information we were given early on did not, in fact, give me a definitive answer. I kind of liked this, at the same time that it maddened me.
I wish I'd had a slightly more conclusive ending or at least more breadcrumbs left for us to understand what was going on. For that reason alone I deducted a star.
Conclusion:
I don't know if I agree with the comparisons to the Secret History, as the philosophical themes of the story seem to tend more towards the cosmic horror side of things rather than the intersection of beauty and terror. The premise, though -- an evil sentient house; cosmic existentialism; gnostic secret layers of knowledge attained only through enlightenment (does NOT represent my personal views on real life, but a favorite theme of mine); an alien, inhuman future -- were right up my alley.
Thank you also Mr. Maclean for being so staunchly anti-AI. It's the first thing I noticed in the early pages, and so I did kind of go into reading the book thinking it would be about an evil AI-run house. I was pleasantly surprised when it was not.
Thank you to NetGalley and Grove Atlantic for a free ARC in exchange for my honest opinion!
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Solace House opens in 1993, with student Alex Lane trying to sort out his life now that the university is breaking up for the summer. Unlike the others, Alex cannot go back home, as a consequence of a mysterious family tragedy. Broke and alone, he is preparing for the worst until he is offered the opportunity to join a group of students clearing out a Victorian mental hospital that is being acquired by the university and repurposed as student lodging.
Within the sanatorium grounds stands the eponymous house, once the home of the lonely and reclusive Edwin Flayne. Sorting through the hoards of junk left by Flayne, the students discover his journals, which reveal an interest in occult and esoteric studies. Evidently traumatised by the events of his childhood, particularly the estrangement between his parents and the departure of his beloved mother, Flayne seeks to regain the lost Arcadia of his childhood through complex quasi-mathematical rituals, obsessively recorded in his books. Through these, Flayne believes, he can access an alternate reality where time stands still and the past can be redrawn. Central to these rituals is the strange twilit cave ‘Bewise’, found behind Solace House, which contains evidence of prehistoric habitation and possible ceremonial use.
Each in their own way, the students become increasingly engrossed with Flayne, the house and its secrets. Meanwhile Alex and the beautiful, intelligent – but impulsive – Ella become lovers. Their relationship has all the markings of a youthful, hedonistic summer affair, yet it carries a darker edge, seemingly fuelled by their shared and growing obsession with Flayne’s writings. They also draw the jealous attention of Adam, a strange solitary figure among the student group. As the weeks pass, reality becomes increasingly frayed under the influence of a heady mix of marijuana, magic mushrooms and occult arcana.
The older I get, the less stamina I have for longer novels, and I tend to pass on any book that exceeds the 400-page mark. I made an exception for Solace House primarily because I had loved Will Maclean’s debut, The Apparition Phase, so much. After experiencing Maclean’s new novel – because an ‘experience’ it definitely is – I find myself in two minds about it, unsure whether it is incredibly ambitious or overly self-indulgent, or perhaps some mixture of both. I am not referring solely to its length, although at close to six hundred pages that is striking enough, but also to its deliberate and almost wanton complexity.
Interspersed throughout the text is an epic poem composed in a pastiche of an overwrought Victorian style, purportedly discovered in Flayne’s journals. In his afterword, the author assures us that the poem is entirely his own work and does not involve any assistance from AI. Even taking that claim at face value, one can imagine the hours of painstaking labour it must have required. By the end, the reader realises that there is more to this poem than first meets the eye. Then there are the intertextual references, the twists and turns of plot, the foreshadowing and dropped hints that make Solace House one of those novels one is tempted to revisit once the ending is known. Not least are MacLean’s attempts to render in coherent prose both the oneiric effects of hallucinogenic trips and the slow descent into a breakdown of reality.
Solace House has been compared to The Haunting of Hill House and The Secret History. I am not sure these comparisons are especially helpful. This is not really a work of ‘dark academia’, nor is it exactly a haunted-house story, though Maclean does employ some familiar tropes of the genre – for instance, the ancient telephone that rings ominously from under the junk. In truth, Maclean is something of a magpie (in a positive sense), drawing on multiple influences: such as the mystical Romanticism of Blake and the Pre-Raphaelites, as well as the occult British fiction and cosmic/folk horror of the early twentieth century – Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen readily come to mind. There is that quality I often associate with the best supernatural fiction: the lingering uncertainty as to whether the events described are truly otherworldly, or merely the product of a mind dislodged by illness or drugs (think of Oliver Onions’s classic The Beckoning Fair One). Beneath the layers of esotericism there also lies a rather different book – a nostalgic coming-of-age narrative, the melancholic story of a ‘last summer of youth’.
So what is my final assessment? I still do not quite know. The novel is not perfect. It is probably overlong; it has its longueurs; and at times its intricate machinery creaks slightly. Yet it held my attention through its hundreds of pages, and it is one of those novels whose aura continues to linger for several days after one has finished it. Perhaps the closest comparison would be with the prog-rock albums of the 1970s (and not just because of the drugs!): wildly ambitious, over-the-top, occasionally erratic, but ultimately monumental.
https://endsoftheword.blogspot.com/20...
Within the sanatorium grounds stands the eponymous house, once the home of the lonely and reclusive Edwin Flayne. Sorting through the hoards of junk left by Flayne, the students discover his journals, which reveal an interest in occult and esoteric studies. Evidently traumatised by the events of his childhood, particularly the estrangement between his parents and the departure of his beloved mother, Flayne seeks to regain the lost Arcadia of his childhood through complex quasi-mathematical rituals, obsessively recorded in his books. Through these, Flayne believes, he can access an alternate reality where time stands still and the past can be redrawn. Central to these rituals is the strange twilit cave ‘Bewise’, found behind Solace House, which contains evidence of prehistoric habitation and possible ceremonial use.
Each in their own way, the students become increasingly engrossed with Flayne, the house and its secrets. Meanwhile Alex and the beautiful, intelligent – but impulsive – Ella become lovers. Their relationship has all the markings of a youthful, hedonistic summer affair, yet it carries a darker edge, seemingly fuelled by their shared and growing obsession with Flayne’s writings. They also draw the jealous attention of Adam, a strange solitary figure among the student group. As the weeks pass, reality becomes increasingly frayed under the influence of a heady mix of marijuana, magic mushrooms and occult arcana.
The older I get, the less stamina I have for longer novels, and I tend to pass on any book that exceeds the 400-page mark. I made an exception for Solace House primarily because I had loved Will Maclean’s debut, The Apparition Phase, so much. After experiencing Maclean’s new novel – because an ‘experience’ it definitely is – I find myself in two minds about it, unsure whether it is incredibly ambitious or overly self-indulgent, or perhaps some mixture of both. I am not referring solely to its length, although at close to six hundred pages that is striking enough, but also to its deliberate and almost wanton complexity.
Interspersed throughout the text is an epic poem composed in a pastiche of an overwrought Victorian style, purportedly discovered in Flayne’s journals. In his afterword, the author assures us that the poem is entirely his own work and does not involve any assistance from AI. Even taking that claim at face value, one can imagine the hours of painstaking labour it must have required. By the end, the reader realises that there is more to this poem than first meets the eye. Then there are the intertextual references, the twists and turns of plot, the foreshadowing and dropped hints that make Solace House one of those novels one is tempted to revisit once the ending is known. Not least are MacLean’s attempts to render in coherent prose both the oneiric effects of hallucinogenic trips and the slow descent into a breakdown of reality.
Solace House has been compared to The Haunting of Hill House and The Secret History. I am not sure these comparisons are especially helpful. This is not really a work of ‘dark academia’, nor is it exactly a haunted-house story, though Maclean does employ some familiar tropes of the genre – for instance, the ancient telephone that rings ominously from under the junk. In truth, Maclean is something of a magpie (in a positive sense), drawing on multiple influences: such as the mystical Romanticism of Blake and the Pre-Raphaelites, as well as the occult British fiction and cosmic/folk horror of the early twentieth century – Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen readily come to mind. There is that quality I often associate with the best supernatural fiction: the lingering uncertainty as to whether the events described are truly otherworldly, or merely the product of a mind dislodged by illness or drugs (think of Oliver Onions’s classic The Beckoning Fair One). Beneath the layers of esotericism there also lies a rather different book – a nostalgic coming-of-age narrative, the melancholic story of a ‘last summer of youth’.
So what is my final assessment? I still do not quite know. The novel is not perfect. It is probably overlong; it has its longueurs; and at times its intricate machinery creaks slightly. Yet it held my attention through its hundreds of pages, and it is one of those novels whose aura continues to linger for several days after one has finished it. Perhaps the closest comparison would be with the prog-rock albums of the 1970s (and not just because of the drugs!): wildly ambitious, over-the-top, occasionally erratic, but ultimately monumental.
https://endsoftheword.blogspot.com/20...
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
⭐️3.5 Will Maclean, oh how you have split my brain and heart in two. While I can see how the ending of this book may be polarizing, I have formed two poles within myself after reading this.
All that was promised, I found the book delivered on. There's a richness and depth to the way the book and story are structured, a creeping unpacking and unraveling. Some may find it slow to start, but I found it put down the exact right amount of foundation for the story to build on and escalate. It reaches its pinnacle in a hellfeverdream of a scene involving psychedelics that gave me the same haunting thrill as an Ari Aster film, and concludes in a way that will send most readers back to page 1 to start all over again.
The themes spoke to me, of grief and sanity, grappling with the reality of our existence and our deaths, of matters beyond our comprehension and how all of those things come to meet each other. The book does an excellent job of playing with these themes in a compelling way; not in a singular, linear point it is trying to make, but in a journey it takes you on to places where you'll stop and reassess.
I know we generally describe works as either character driven or plot driven, but I find myself worrying that calling Solace House plot-driven gives the wrong impression, as if it were no more than a mystery being solved. When reading the book from that perspective, I can understand people's frustration with the ending. To me, it was perfect.
The chapter openings did little for me as I was reading the book, and I was unsurprised to learn their purpose (perhaps the Swiftie in me, drilled to decode such messages) but very pleased to learn everything they contained. By itself it may have been gimmicky, but that absolutely cannot be said of the way it is used as part of the story here. Thank you, Will Maclean, for respecting your readers enough to state that you did not use AI to construct the puzzle at the center of this novel. That effort is appreciated.
Now, the reason I started off this review with such dramatics... The prose style of this book was baffling to me. It feels like the author constantly moves clauses around, sandwiched in commas, add an em dash, replace a period with a semicolon, out of fear of producing simple sentences. Commas were used so excessively, at times it felt like the narrator was constantly gasping for air.
This is made even more interesting by the fact that the author seems to aggressively direct the tone and delivery of every word, every sentence, through a firm selection of punctuation and deployment of italics, to an exhausting degree. I have since learned the author is also a screenwriter and director, and that was an enlightening discovery. In my opinion, it definitely shows.
A novel does not require such precise direction of delivery, there are no actors, the multiple layers of capturing and portraying that are part of screen media are entirely missing from a book. And while I found the ending a powerful conclusion to the story, the scene where the narrator spills it all, out loud, to a random person, as if it were exposition dialogue on a network detective show even though they don't even need to say it out loud for us to read it, threatened to ruin it all for me. I am happy to report it didn't, but we're on thin ice here.
My instant love for the beautiful cover and intriguing premise made my frustration with the prose exceptionally devastating, but fortunately also drove me to push through to the end. I was not led astray, I ultimately got what I hoped for. You should read this book!
All that was promised, I found the book delivered on. There's a richness and depth to the way the book and story are structured, a creeping unpacking and unraveling. Some may find it slow to start, but I found it put down the exact right amount of foundation for the story to build on and escalate. It reaches its pinnacle in a hellfeverdream of a scene involving psychedelics that gave me the same haunting thrill as an Ari Aster film, and concludes in a way that will send most readers back to page 1 to start all over again.
The themes spoke to me, of grief and sanity, grappling with the reality of our existence and our deaths, of matters beyond our comprehension and how all of those things come to meet each other. The book does an excellent job of playing with these themes in a compelling way; not in a singular, linear point it is trying to make, but in a journey it takes you on to places where you'll stop and reassess.
I know we generally describe works as either character driven or plot driven, but I find myself worrying that calling Solace House plot-driven gives the wrong impression, as if it were no more than a mystery being solved. When reading the book from that perspective, I can understand people's frustration with the ending. To me, it was perfect.
The chapter openings did little for me as I was reading the book, and I was unsurprised to learn their purpose (perhaps the Swiftie in me, drilled to decode such messages) but very pleased to learn everything they contained. By itself it may have been gimmicky, but that absolutely cannot be said of the way it is used as part of the story here. Thank you, Will Maclean, for respecting your readers enough to state that you did not use AI to construct the puzzle at the center of this novel. That effort is appreciated.
Now, the reason I started off this review with such dramatics... The prose style of this book was baffling to me. It feels like the author constantly moves clauses around, sandwiched in commas, add an em dash, replace a period with a semicolon, out of fear of producing simple sentences. Commas were used so excessively, at times it felt like the narrator was constantly gasping for air.
This is made even more interesting by the fact that the author seems to aggressively direct the tone and delivery of every word, every sentence, through a firm selection of punctuation and deployment of italics, to an exhausting degree. I have since learned the author is also a screenwriter and director, and that was an enlightening discovery. In my opinion, it definitely shows.
A novel does not require such precise direction of delivery, there are no actors, the multiple layers of capturing and portraying that are part of screen media are entirely missing from a book. And while I found the ending a powerful conclusion to the story, the scene where the narrator spills it all, out loud, to a random person, as if it were exposition dialogue on a network detective show even though they don't even need to say it out loud for us to read it, threatened to ruin it all for me. I am happy to report it didn't, but we're on thin ice here.
My instant love for the beautiful cover and intriguing premise made my frustration with the prose exceptionally devastating, but fortunately also drove me to push through to the end. I was not led astray, I ultimately got what I hoped for. You should read this book!
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
This was quite the cerebral read, and I love challenging my brain a bit. I'm a sucker for puzzles inside stories, and this one delivers.
SPOILERS ahead. If you choose to read the spoilers anyway, I still recommend reading this book.
Anyway, I would say there are a few things that could have been trimmed to keep the action crisper, but all in all, this was a very rich, solid read. It's always nice to see diverse vocabulary and sentence structure in a book. I know not a lot of people may appreciate that, but the descriptions were very well done, no matter how trippy the story got. I'll admit, I'm incredibly picky, and I'm giving this one 4.5/5, rounded up.
It took me a little longer to read this one because of how dense it is, but I think thar's a tell that we need to spend more time with the text rather than burning through it.
SPOILERS ahead. If you choose to read the spoilers anyway, I still recommend reading this book.
Anyway, I would say there are a few things that could have been trimmed to keep the action crisper, but all in all, this was a very rich, solid read. It's always nice to see diverse vocabulary and sentence structure in a book. I know not a lot of people may appreciate that, but the descriptions were very well done, no matter how trippy the story got. I'll admit, I'm incredibly picky, and I'm giving this one 4.5/5, rounded up.
It took me a little longer to read this one because of how dense it is, but I think thar's a tell that we need to spend more time with the text rather than burning through it.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
3.5/5
The last 20% of this book was the best part, I wish we had gotten there a little sooner and been able to spend more time there. None of the characters felt fully developed to me, even Alex who we spend the book with, and this book felt like it should have been a screenplay instead with the way the characterization was formed. All very one note.
I'm also not a fan of the way Maclean writes women, every woman in the novel subscribed to the Madonna-Whore Complex.
*Spoiler*
Overall, I would read something from this author again as the idea was original, I just hope he can improve his characterization, especially of his female characters.
Alex Lane is broke, and tired of listening to his wealthy friends discuss their exciting summer break plans (don't ask why they don't just offer for him to join- they're rich enough for that- they're just assholes). Alex plans to crash in the dorms until he gets kicked out, and lucks into a summer job cleaning an old building on some land that the school is trying to buy. He quickly fits into the group of students assigned to this task, who are also living together while they complete the work. The work goes so quickly they end up being assigned to clean Solace House, a dilapidated Victorian mansion the school is also hoping to purchase.
As time passes, Alex begins a relationship of sorts with one of the women in the group, Ella, but Adam, the odd member of the group drunkenly tells Alex one night that Ella is 'for him'. Ella laughs it off, but Alex keeps one eye open, especially as the students clean through the hoarder mess at Solace House to find the very eerie journals of the home's former owner, Edwin Flayne. The journals detail Flayne's obsession with his missing mother and his beliefs in another realm, and how they may be reached. As each student reacts differently to the information (from mushroom fueled realm trips to fully disregarding), the rift between the students grows, and the lack of supervision leads them to a dangerous place.
Thank you to NetGalley for an eARC of this novel.
The last 20% of this book was the best part, I wish we had gotten there a little sooner and been able to spend more time there. None of the characters felt fully developed to me, even Alex who we spend the book with, and this book felt like it should have been a screenplay instead with the way the characterization was formed. All very one note.
I'm also not a fan of the way Maclean writes women, every woman in the novel subscribed to the Madonna-Whore Complex.
*Spoiler*
Overall, I would read something from this author again as the idea was original, I just hope he can improve his characterization, especially of his female characters.
Alex Lane is broke, and tired of listening to his wealthy friends discuss their exciting summer break plans (don't ask why they don't just offer for him to join- they're rich enough for that- they're just assholes). Alex plans to crash in the dorms until he gets kicked out, and lucks into a summer job cleaning an old building on some land that the school is trying to buy. He quickly fits into the group of students assigned to this task, who are also living together while they complete the work. The work goes so quickly they end up being assigned to clean Solace House, a dilapidated Victorian mansion the school is also hoping to purchase.
As time passes, Alex begins a relationship of sorts with one of the women in the group, Ella, but Adam, the odd member of the group drunkenly tells Alex one night that Ella is 'for him'. Ella laughs it off, but Alex keeps one eye open, especially as the students clean through the hoarder mess at Solace House to find the very eerie journals of the home's former owner, Edwin Flayne. The journals detail Flayne's obsession with his missing mother and his beliefs in another realm, and how they may be reached. As each student reacts differently to the information (from mushroom fueled realm trips to fully disregarding), the rift between the students grows, and the lack of supervision leads them to a dangerous place.
Thank you to NetGalley for an eARC of this novel.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
There are books that simply keep you reading, and this was one of those for me. For a novel of this length, I got through it pretty quickly, which already says something in its favor. The prose is strong, if occasionally a little excessive, the atmosphere is carefully built, and there is enough intrigue to keep you moving even when the book starts to sprawl.
What the novel is aiming for is a sustained sense of uncertainty. It wants to disorient, to keep the reader slightly off balance, and at its best that works very well. There are stretches where the ambiguity creates real unease, and the descriptions in particular are effective enough to make the setting feel heavy with menace. But there were also many moments when that same opacity stopped feeling purposeful and started to feel more like drift.
I also do not think it needed to be this long. There is enough here in terms of atmosphere, ideas, and stylistic control to sustain a substantial novel, but not always enough narrative momentum to justify the full length. Too often it feels as though the book is circling something rather than advancing toward it, continually postponing whatever revelation or rupture it is building toward. As a result, one of the strongest impressions it left me with was that of anti-climax. It keeps summoning tension only to sidestep the payoff again and again, and by the end the whole thing felt rather pointless, to be honest.
The protagonist is quite insufferable, but that is not something I hold against a book in itself. In fact, I often actively enjoy difficult or unpleasant characters. What I cannot excuse, however, is his being boring as hell. In fact, I found him less interesting on the page than I had imagined he might be, which was frankly a letdown. And I cannot add much about the treatment of female characters that other reviewers have not already said: continuing to fall back on the virgin-whore dichotomy in 2026 feels pretty limited, if we are being honest.
That said, I would not call this a bad book at all. In fact, I think it is a well-written one. The prose is probably its greatest strength, and it is the main reason I kept reading so steadily. There is a real knack here for mood and for evoking spaces that feel both tangible and wrong. But for all its technical control, it ultimately struck me as a book that lacks soul. I could admire what it was doing more than I could ever feel fully pulled into.
One last disclaimer, because I really feel it needs saying: this is not remotely dark academia. I know comparing your book to The Secret History is an easy way to generate interest, but it is also a very effective way to guarantee disappointment once readers realize it is nothing like it.
What the novel is aiming for is a sustained sense of uncertainty. It wants to disorient, to keep the reader slightly off balance, and at its best that works very well. There are stretches where the ambiguity creates real unease, and the descriptions in particular are effective enough to make the setting feel heavy with menace. But there were also many moments when that same opacity stopped feeling purposeful and started to feel more like drift.
I also do not think it needed to be this long. There is enough here in terms of atmosphere, ideas, and stylistic control to sustain a substantial novel, but not always enough narrative momentum to justify the full length. Too often it feels as though the book is circling something rather than advancing toward it, continually postponing whatever revelation or rupture it is building toward. As a result, one of the strongest impressions it left me with was that of anti-climax. It keeps summoning tension only to sidestep the payoff again and again, and by the end the whole thing felt rather pointless, to be honest.
The protagonist is quite insufferable, but that is not something I hold against a book in itself. In fact, I often actively enjoy difficult or unpleasant characters. What I cannot excuse, however, is his being boring as hell. In fact, I found him less interesting on the page than I had imagined he might be, which was frankly a letdown. And I cannot add much about the treatment of female characters that other reviewers have not already said: continuing to fall back on the virgin-whore dichotomy in 2026 feels pretty limited, if we are being honest.
That said, I would not call this a bad book at all. In fact, I think it is a well-written one. The prose is probably its greatest strength, and it is the main reason I kept reading so steadily. There is a real knack here for mood and for evoking spaces that feel both tangible and wrong. But for all its technical control, it ultimately struck me as a book that lacks soul. I could admire what it was doing more than I could ever feel fully pulled into.
One last disclaimer, because I really feel it needs saying: this is not remotely dark academia. I know comparing your book to The Secret History is an easy way to generate interest, but it is also a very effective way to guarantee disappointment once readers realize it is nothing like it.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Thanks to NetGalley, Grove Atlantic and Will Maclean for this ARC. All opinions are my own.
Available October 13 2026.
Will Maclean's SOLACE HOUSE is...a little bit of everything, to say the least. It's horror and romance, thriller and comedy, with a healthy dose of philosophical existential crises and some murderous intent. In short: it's absolutely fantastic.
We follow Alex Lane, a nineteen-year-old English student as he struggles to come up with a plan for the summer. Certain thigns align and he finds himself cleaning out a former "refuge for the traumatised" called Marshlands with a few other students. Not too long into doing so, they get assigned to clean out a Victorian house next to the property, called Solace House, which up until two years prior had been owned by a man called Edwin Flayne. Mr Flayne, for reasons unknown, hoarded so many items in the house that he essentially barricaded it from the world, and our protagonist Alex, with his friends, decides to find out what exactly Mr Flayne tried to hide.
SOLACE HOUSE's standout quality is Maclean's writing style. The prose is eloquent and clear, drawing you in so well that you truly forget you are reading a book, rather than simply living through the events yourself. It is not just a part of the book, though - Maclean utilises it as a perfect tool for the narrative, weaving long sentences during disorienting moments, sharp and snappy in clear times, but never too much. His ability to create atmosphere and breathe life into places like Solace House, Marshlands, and Bewise, both through narration and characters' own thoughts, perceptions and reactions to them makes it difficult to put the book down. It even got to a point where it got too much - where I had to put the book down because I was, simply put, absolutely terrified.
The novel is marketed as a lovechild of THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE and THE SECRET HISTORY, which isn't a wrong pairing, but isn't entirely accurate, either. Yes, there are students who want to uncover a mystery, with an interesting group dynamic, but aside from a few intellectual comments and the lovely prose, there aren't too many similarities with TSH. HILL HOUSE, on the other hand, is a much more accurate comparison, though more so in the latter half of the novel. Trust me: SOLACE HOUSE is something different altogether, but it's spooky, with interesting characters, and an ending that will leave you itching for a reread.
If you like well-written psychological mysteries, not-entirely-closed endings, and philosophical discussion alongside some keep-you-up-at-night horror, this is the perfect book for you.
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my brain hurts (RTC)
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
I was a big fan of Will Maclean’s previous novel, The Apparition Phase, and also his work on The Broken Veil podcast, so I was very excited to see this one come up on NetGalley. There are definite similarities to The Apparition Phase here, with the narrator being a somewhat gauche young man hung up on an idealised woman, but this is a much more ambitious book. The marketing is understandably citing more popular novels that people this century have actually read, but for me the clearest antecedent is William Hope Hodgson’s The House On The Borderland, with its vision of an eternal structure buffeted by huge cosmic forces. There’s something of House of Leaves in here as well, even The Haunting Of Hill House with the idea of the house being a representation of a character’s psychic space. It probably has something in common with books that don’t also have House in the title as well, but who cares about them?
Of the everyday elements, the depiction of long student summers in the nineties rang very true, and the relationships between the unlikely company that assembles are very entertaining, but where the book really flies is when it engages with the supernatural experiences laying behind the mysteries. There are huge pinwheeling visions of eternity, labyrinthine paths and connections and endless recursiveness as almost everything of any substance in the book is echoed and paralleled elsewhere, and then echoed again in its turn. In years to come there will be huge exegeses online trying to bring them all together, but I warn you, you’re going to need that meme of the guy with the chaotic noticeboard and the red string connecting hundreds of documents and photos.
Is it perfect? No, there are definite flaws - there are two characters early on whose only purpose seems to be to highlight the naivety of the narrator and they feel like are dangling in the wind by the end, and the key character arc for Ella is there to serve the narrator rather than achieve anything in her own right - but these are tiny pebbles against a vast mountain of enjoyment. Maclean is rapidly becoming one of the foremost practitioners of weird fiction in the UK, and I can’t wait to see what he does next.
Of the everyday elements, the depiction of long student summers in the nineties rang very true, and the relationships between the unlikely company that assembles are very entertaining, but where the book really flies is when it engages with the supernatural experiences laying behind the mysteries. There are huge pinwheeling visions of eternity, labyrinthine paths and connections and endless recursiveness as almost everything of any substance in the book is echoed and paralleled elsewhere, and then echoed again in its turn. In years to come there will be huge exegeses online trying to bring them all together, but I warn you, you’re going to need that meme of the guy with the chaotic noticeboard and the red string connecting hundreds of documents and photos.
Is it perfect? No, there are definite flaws - there are two characters early on whose only purpose seems to be to highlight the naivety of the narrator and they feel like are dangling in the wind by the end, and the key character arc for Ella is there to serve the narrator rather than achieve anything in her own right - but these are tiny pebbles against a vast mountain of enjoyment. Maclean is rapidly becoming one of the foremost practitioners of weird fiction in the UK, and I can’t wait to see what he does next.
March 27, 2026
Solace House is ultimately a fun, popcorn-horror page-turner, but it makes you work far too hard to get to the ride.
The book is a 500+ page behemoth that spends its entire first half as a meandering slow burn. Unfortunately, the extensive setup feels irrelevant, as it doesn't meaningfully deepen our understanding of the characters or the setting. The cast largely sounds the same, and Maclean spends a lot of time on details that prolong the story without propelling the plot. Because of this, comparisons to The Secret History do this book a major disservice; where Donna Tartt uses micro-level details to build agonizing suspense and rich characterization, the details here often just feel like clutter.
However, once you hit the 50-60% mark, the book finally shifts gears. The hallucinogenic, haunted-house trip in Act 2 borders on repetitive, but the subsequent "twist" in Act 3 was a fantastic, thrilling reprise.
The multi-layered epigraphic poetry at the beginning of the chapters… was cool. While I initially skipped them because they lacked context, the eventual reveal that they form a layered secret message is a cool. Kudos to Maclean for the sheer craft of constructing that, but truthfully I didn’t feel like it was anything meaningful or like a “twist” in any way.
Where the book lost me again was the toward the middle of Act 3. I loved the initially grounded aspect of Alex believing the rituals and spirits were fake. But when he wakes from a coma suddenly believing it's all real, it undoes the grounded reality the plot worked so hard to build. The ending devolves into a Shutter Island-esque psychological ambiguity that asks the reader to do too much of the heavy lifting. You're left with zero clear guidelines on how to interpret the reality of the story (Was he manic? Was there a car crash? Are we dimension-jumping?), leaving it entirely unclear if this was meant to be a fantasy horror or a grounded psychological thriller. Some heavy-handed hinting earlier in the book didn't help clarify the messy finale.
Bottom Line: Once it gets going, it’s a thrilling, trippy ride. But it isn't worth the 500-page investment, and readers expecting a dark academia masterpiece will likely be disappointed. A solid, if structurally flawed, popcorn thriller.
The book is a 500+ page behemoth that spends its entire first half as a meandering slow burn. Unfortunately, the extensive setup feels irrelevant, as it doesn't meaningfully deepen our understanding of the characters or the setting. The cast largely sounds the same, and Maclean spends a lot of time on details that prolong the story without propelling the plot. Because of this, comparisons to The Secret History do this book a major disservice; where Donna Tartt uses micro-level details to build agonizing suspense and rich characterization, the details here often just feel like clutter.
However, once you hit the 50-60% mark, the book finally shifts gears. The hallucinogenic, haunted-house trip in Act 2 borders on repetitive, but the subsequent "twist" in Act 3 was a fantastic, thrilling reprise.
The multi-layered epigraphic poetry at the beginning of the chapters… was cool. While I initially skipped them because they lacked context, the eventual reveal that they form a layered secret message is a cool. Kudos to Maclean for the sheer craft of constructing that, but truthfully I didn’t feel like it was anything meaningful or like a “twist” in any way.
Where the book lost me again was the toward the middle of Act 3. I loved the initially grounded aspect of Alex believing the rituals and spirits were fake. But when he wakes from a coma suddenly believing it's all real, it undoes the grounded reality the plot worked so hard to build. The ending devolves into a Shutter Island-esque psychological ambiguity that asks the reader to do too much of the heavy lifting. You're left with zero clear guidelines on how to interpret the reality of the story (Was he manic? Was there a car crash? Are we dimension-jumping?), leaving it entirely unclear if this was meant to be a fantasy horror or a grounded psychological thriller. Some heavy-handed hinting earlier in the book didn't help clarify the messy finale.
Bottom Line: Once it gets going, it’s a thrilling, trippy ride. But it isn't worth the 500-page investment, and readers expecting a dark academia masterpiece will likely be disappointed. A solid, if structurally flawed, popcorn thriller.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Thank you to Grove Atlantic for supplying an Advance Reader Copy of this book through NetGalley.
This is a difficult novel to review without giving spoilers, but Solace House is, at its core, an ambitious and intelligent slow burn. The opening third of the novel drew me in quickly and I was eager to keep reading. I enjoy reading books where I don’t fully understand what’s going on at times, and Solace House definitely delivered in this area. It reminded me a little of Piranesi in its intrigue and disorientation.
The 1990s English university setting, with no phones, no WiFi etc., works well and feels thematically appropriate. The pacing in the middle of the book lost some of the early momentum, although later revelations in the novel made me think that this could be intentional to reflect the recurring imagery and ideas about time and perception. I found myself wanting the narrative to move forward more quickly, as it felt like the plot should have progressed further by that point. The final third of the novel compensates for this, as it leans into its strangeness, raising questions, drawing connections and delivering twists; I read the last section very quickly.
Without heading into spoiler territory, the poetry in the novel initially seemed easy to overlook but was eventually revealed to be far more significant. I appreciate how its structure and later revelations echoed the recurring imagery and themes of the book. Similarly, I really enjoyed the way later sections re-contextualise earlier moments which seemed normal but are later revealed to be something very different.
Given the time spent on the group’s work at Marshlands and Solace House in the first part of the novel, I felt that stronger emotional connections and deeper relationships between the students would have added to the story and would have made later revelations more meaningful.
Overall, Solace House is thoughtful, complex and very original; at times it feels disorienting and maybe uneven in pacing but it is clear that it is a carefully crafted work with strong artistic vision. It offers a rewarding pay-off and leaves you thinking about it afterwards - I would definitely recommend it.
This is a difficult novel to review without giving spoilers, but Solace House is, at its core, an ambitious and intelligent slow burn. The opening third of the novel drew me in quickly and I was eager to keep reading. I enjoy reading books where I don’t fully understand what’s going on at times, and Solace House definitely delivered in this area. It reminded me a little of Piranesi in its intrigue and disorientation.
The 1990s English university setting, with no phones, no WiFi etc., works well and feels thematically appropriate. The pacing in the middle of the book lost some of the early momentum, although later revelations in the novel made me think that this could be intentional to reflect the recurring imagery and ideas about time and perception. I found myself wanting the narrative to move forward more quickly, as it felt like the plot should have progressed further by that point. The final third of the novel compensates for this, as it leans into its strangeness, raising questions, drawing connections and delivering twists; I read the last section very quickly.
Without heading into spoiler territory, the poetry in the novel initially seemed easy to overlook but was eventually revealed to be far more significant. I appreciate how its structure and later revelations echoed the recurring imagery and themes of the book. Similarly, I really enjoyed the way later sections re-contextualise earlier moments which seemed normal but are later revealed to be something very different.
Given the time spent on the group’s work at Marshlands and Solace House in the first part of the novel, I felt that stronger emotional connections and deeper relationships between the students would have added to the story and would have made later revelations more meaningful.
Overall, Solace House is thoughtful, complex and very original; at times it feels disorienting and maybe uneven in pacing but it is clear that it is a carefully crafted work with strong artistic vision. It offers a rewarding pay-off and leaves you thinking about it afterwards - I would definitely recommend it.
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