The Horror Inside: A review of "The Upstairs Room" by Kate Murray-Browne

"The Upstairs Room" 

by Kate Murray-Browne

A book review

Eleanor, Richard, their toddler daughter Rosie and baby Isobel move into a four-bedroomed Victorian townhouse in London Fields. The purchase has been quick and smooth - too quick for Eleanor. Whilst Richard is enthusiastic about this once-in-a-lifetime investment, she immediately feels uneasy about what should be their new home. She is particularly disturbed by an "upstairs room" whose walls are covered in the obsessive scribblings left by the enigmatic "Emily", the girl who used to live there. Soon the unease turns into actual physical malaise. Eleanor succumbs to a strange illness which seems to cast a shadow not only on the young family, but also on Zoe, the lodger who takes up residence in the house's basement. Will they escape the house's evil influence before it's too late?

Kate Murray-Browne's debut novel is, first and foremost, a "haunted house" tale which exploits many tropes of the genre. There are night-time terrors, doors with a character of their own, strange writings appearing on walls and mundane objects which take on a sinister significance when they turn up in the unlikeliest of places. Little children play a central role - their vulnerability heightens the sense of danger but, as most of the novel's readers would surely know, their very sensitiveness also makes them an ideal channel for evil presences. Or so would many horror films want us to believe.

As far as ghost stories go, The Upstairs Room is not particularly original or remarkable - though it is certainly well-written and I must say the scares are carefully orchestrated. Some scenes (such as Zoe's attempt to babysit Rosie) definitely creeped me out. I also enjoyed the book's deliberate ambiguity about the nature of the "hauntings" - a feature shared with the best "psychological" ghost stories from Oliver Onion's The Beckoning Fair One to Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House via James's The Turn of the Screw. The novel allows for a spectrum of readings - one may shrug off the weird events by giving them a rational, pscyhological explanation, treat them a straightforward "haunting" or seek an interpretation which combines the two.

Within the walls of this haunted house tale, however, resides a very different book - indeed, The Upstairs Room is also a hyper-realist novel which presents us with a slice of contemporary British life. It is inhabited by college and university graduates struggling to make the transition into the working world; young couples with empty bank accounts hunting for living spaces whilst undecided about "settling down"; men and women approaching middle-age who, as in Gabriele Muccino's early movies, keep rueing a youth which has just passed them by. The ghostly house becomes the unlikely symbol of the housing (and other) problems of the young and not-so-young and there are long passages (especially in the novel's third part) where the reader actually forgets that this is a supernatural yarn.

In this respect, The Upstairs Room "sister-novel" could well be Sarah Waters' The Little Stranger In that book, Waters used the "haunted house" tale as a pretext for a social novel set in the austerity of the post-war years. Murray-Browne's debut novel brings us closer to home. This is what makes it worth reading.

Kindle Edition, 320 pages

Published July 27th 2017 by Picador

Kate Murray-Browne is also a visual artist.  This is one of her works: "Chair" https://bowarts.org/news/20-prints-for-20-years-kate-murray-browne