Wow!!! What exciting news. It sounds really scary! Shirley Jackson's
The Haunting of Hill House is one of my favorite books and the original movie (1963) is fantastic. So, if this new book is really in the same league as the Jackson book, then that's really great.
I can imagine that Waters would be good at writing a scary book...
Affinity was pretty scary or at least spooky in certain ways. It'll be fun to see Waters getting fully into that type of writing for this book.
Thanks for pointing this out! I hadn't heard about it until you posted this.
The Little Stranger
by Sarah Waters
To be released on April 30, 2009.
Review [amazon.com]
Waters (The Night Watch) reflects on the collapse of the British class system after WWII in a stunning haunted house tale whose ghosts are as horrifying as any in Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House. Doctor Faraday, a lonely bachelor, first visited Hundreds Hall, where his mother once worked as a parlor maid, at age 10 in 1919. When Faraday returns 30 years later to treat a servant, he becomes obsessed with Hundreds's elegant owner, Mrs. Ayres; her 24-year-old son, Roderick, an RAF airman wounded during the war who now oversees the family farm; and her slightly older daughter, Caroline, considered a “natural spinster” by the locals, for whom the doctor develops a particular fondness. Supernatural trouble kicks in after Caroline's mild-mannered black Lab, Gyp, attacks a visiting child. A damaging fire, a suicide and worse follow. Faraday, one of literature's more unreliable narrators, carries the reader swiftly along to the devastating conclusion.
— Publishers Weekly Starred review