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.
While this novel is a significant departure for Celestin, the historical period and the murder plot are not far away from his City Blues crime quartet. Wearing its gothic heart on its sleeve, Palace of Shadows uses a frame narrative broken up with found texts. Our frame narrator is Sam Etherstone, a widowed artist desperate for work. Pulled into Mrs Chesterfield’s sinister orbit by promises of a lucrative commission, Sam soon begins to understand that the house is more than unsettling. There are ghosts here: missing girls from decades ago, Sam’s own wife, and the architect of the house, Francisco Varano.
Frame narratives are tricky. We are with Sam for more than 150 pages, and so when the narrative switches to follow Varano, 50 years earlier, it’s a jolt. A precedent such as Dracula makes that structure a no less daunting choice for a writer. Do you intersperse different narrators evenly, so the reader knows what they’re getting – and who – right from the start, which can slow the pace; or do you risk frustration by jumping to a new narrator a third of the way through? The leap does jar here, but it’s worth it.
The big difficulty with the gothic is where to draw the moral line. Traditionally, it’s a genre of wild grotesquerie: the 19th-century version of the Saw franchise. Melmoth the Wanderer includes a cannibalism scene, Mr Hyde crushes a small child, and Edgar Allan Poe has one of his more unfortunate characters stuffed up a chimney by an orangutang – but how far is too far?
Here, one of the narrators repeatedly rapes a young girl. Bad characters have to do bad things; but even Sam, who is otherwise a good-hearted narrator, seems not to see the gut-slitting horror of it. Instead he reflects that the child wins a kind of victory over her attacker because she already has syphilis – “why else would she smile at him after every assault?” We never see the child’s perspective, and the main purpose of the scene seems to be to establish that the perpetrator is a horrible man. This kind of morally illustrative assault, present only to demonstrate another character’s criminality, is almost never aimed at an adult man, and when it is, it’s not dealt with as a minor plot point of little impact: and rightly so, because that would be a catastrophic failure of imagination.
We all draw our own lines with the gothic. Palace of Shadows tramples over mine. But the image of a legion of ghosts haunting the moor is brilliant; the decision to show events only from the perspective of peripheral, unreliable characters is meticulously clever; and its jigsaw narrative is told in exquisitely executed 19th-century voices. The novel is nine parts pleasing chill, one part nauseating awfulness, and the mixture is an uneasy one.
• Palace of Shadows is published by Mantle (£16.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
