In many ways I am the ideal reader for this queer haunted house novel from the author of the 2022 short-story collection Parallel Hells. As a teenager I was a passionate fan of gothic literature; I love a haunted house novel, and believe The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters’s masterpiece of the genre, is yet to be bettered. It’s an admiration that Leon Craig shares. She also cites Donna Tartt’s The Secret History as an influence, which gives some clue to the setup that greets the reader in The Decadence. Namely, privileged university friends retreat to a haunted country house – inherited, naturally, by one of the group – to indulge in an array of illegal substances and sexual configurations. Bring it on, I thought.
But though I tried very much to care about them, the twists and turns in the characters’ relationships did not make much of an impression. The Decadence is written in a close third person that means we spend the story with Jan, a brittle, self-loathing PhD student whose dissatisfaction with the two female friends she’s been sleeping with preoccupies her to a tedious degree. As for the others, the characterisation is shallow. None of the dialogue feels authentic (“Ursie, you brought the Pimm’s, right?”), there is too much exposition, and the political arguments that the friends keep having feel shoehorned in.
