Book Review: "The House of Mirrors" by Erin Kelly

I have been trying to read more widely into my favourite genre to get a feel for all the different sub-genres in the air at the moment. I recently wrote an article entitled Everything is Cannibalism on the fact that there might be an issue with so many sub-genres within horror. But, it also ends on the note of perhaps splitting it off into sub-genres won't be that bad seeing as this means there'll be more experimenting going on within horror. It's a weird situation seeing as experimenting is good, but if everyone then starts writing one sub-genre because it's doing well, it becomes stale. In The House of Mirrors by Erin Kelly, I find we have two weird situations again: first of all, the book is pretty good in terms of plot and structure. However, unfortunately enough - I found the character of Alice to be not quite to my liking all the time.

Karen and Rex have been together for a while and they have a daughter named Alice. Rex has just been released from prison after he was arrested for killing two people. However, the story of what happened that night remains shrouded in mystery. Whilst her father maintains that he acted in self-defence against one of the men, accidentally killing the other in the process, Alice notices that there is something wrong with the narrative. One of the noticeable discrepencies is whether Rex's sister, Biba was actually in the house or not. The reports created about the incident put Biba somewhere else at the time, but Alice isn't so sure. Ever since Rex's mother committed suicide and his sister, Biba disappeared - the family's past has been a series of carefully woven webs to the point that Rex actually uses Karen's last name instead of his own.

This intrigue is great in terms of story. We have a family who have been hurt over and over again but the hurt is completely unknown and kept from those outside. We have an unreliable narrator in Karen Clarke, a friend of Biba and we have a man we don't trust named Rex. The back and forth between the narratives of Karen and Alice in their respective situations is again, a great modernist take on what becomes a gothic thriller. However, I have to say Alice's moments of being vapid take the reader out of the narrative. She has these moments where it is very clear that she's a try-hard when it comes to nostalgia in aesthetics. It's kind of empty and I didn't enjoy it. She just seems very self-involved and doesn't have the depth her mother has.

Alice runs a shop in which she sells clothes that particularly have an old aesthetic to them. Her parents fund the shop as it doesn't make a lot of money and you can see that her lifestyle is entirely dependent on being a second generation rich kid. One day, someone walks into her shop and simply comments on what Alice looks like and then walks out. It is a moment I think that the reader would've seen coming from a mile away but it also coincides with the timeline in which Alice is trying to investigate about what the true narrative of her family's history is. I found that a tad bit too well-timed but I enjoyed the mystery.

When Rex's father passes away in the book, we also get a new look into some more familial secrecy that we weren't told before. Karen narrates that Rex's father got married for a second time and in that time, he had more children. There were three and they don't get on with Rex. This is ultimately why Rex thinks it is not a good idea to go to the funeral but, we never have this mentioned at any time before. I get that this makes Karen look unreliable with her information and I like it, but it also seems like Karen's narratives are sometimes there to provide some exposition. I have to say though, I preferred Karen to Alice when it comes to narratives even though it was Alice's narrative that carried the story along.

As the story progresses, we are drip-fed information however - I have to say, I thought it was a little bit predictable as I started to get the story of what actually happened far before the writer wrote it down. Be that as it may, I did stick around to enjoy the way it was told to me. The fragmented structure where Karen's narrative would end at one point in one place and then Alice's narrative would pick up from that exact same point and run with it - that was really well done. I would love to see this turned into a movie or something - I can imagine that fragmented narrative would bring something quite fresh to the gothic scene.