The Forgotten Room – a review

As psychiatric nurse Maura Lyle pulls up to Essen Grange, you know what kind of story this is going to be. Essen Grange is a vast, crumbling, sinister, mouldering pile of a place and inside it is a crazy old guy who needs sedating, locking in his room and taking care of. The cleaning lady has, as Maura quickly identifies, been to the Mrs Danvers’ school of running big, creepy old houses. This is a gothic novel. It is such a gothic novel, and I really enjoyed it.

Of course it isn’t long before the first body appears – or rather, the first bones, hinting at a family secret and a troubled past. There’s a gardener with only one ear and a tragic back story. Maura herself is recovering from the death of her partner and worrying about the sinister doctor who appears to have got her this job. There are people who are not saying things, and not saying them so loudly that you can almost hear the words. Except when you find out, nothing is what you might have expected in this tangled, tormented web of lies and cruelty.

With its claustrophobic, almost incestuous atmosphere, its mysteries and deaths, Essen Grange rivals anything Daphne Du Maurier came up with for sheer gothic presence. The house itself exerts a supernatural force on the lives of people it touches, drawing them back, drawing them in, as though there is some malevolent awareness here that is able to pull all their strings for its dance macabre.

The plot is intense, twisty and complicated, and there were times in the middle when I felt I wasn’t keeping up with who was who and who had done what to who else – and I was right. What at first seems like an unravelling of the mystery turns out to be a deepening of it, and nothing is as it seems. Slowly, the question of who, and why is properly answered, and the answers themselves are deeply uneasy. There are horrors here, but they’re more psychological than graphic – although there are a few moments of full on grossness in the mix.

I had trouble putting this one down. The need to make sense of it, to find out what had happened, and how, and why, was compelling. I too kept getting sucked back into the madness of Essen Grange. It proved a deeply satisfying read, and it is a story I expect will stay with me.

More about the book here – https://www.amazon.co.uk/Forgotten-Room-Ann-Troup-ebook/dp/B01BW633TA