In the late 19th century, American weapons heiress Sarah Winchester began what would become an infamous building project: the Winchester House in San Jose. Construction lasted for decades, and the house sprawled, mazey and deliberately bizarre, with stairways leading to nowhere and one tower torn down and rebuilt more than a dozen times.
Palace of Shadows fictionalises that story and transplants it to the Yorkshire moors. Ray Celestin’s gun magnate is Mrs Chesterfield, who expands her labyrinthine mansion further and further out into the moor, perhaps to repel the spirits of those killed by her company’s bullets – or to lure them in. The real house in San Jose is strange enough, but the Chesterfield house is an even more unsettling structure, like something Lovecraft might have designed in collaboration with Piranesi.
