Starling House
Alix E Harrow
From “Paradise” to “Summer’s End”
Opal (no surname) begins Starling House with this
People like me have to make two lists: what they need and what they want. You keep the first list short, if you’re smart, and you burn the second one.
The most revealing part of that advice is the first three words, "people like me". Opal and her half-brother Jasper live rent-free in a motel room. Their mother is dead and they never knew their fathers. Jasper is in high school, and Opal works retail. With that and a combination of petty fraud and thievery, she just barely manages to make ends meet.
Opal's "what I need" list has one thing on it: to get her brother Jasper out of Eden.
The town of Eden, in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky, is where Opal and Jasper live. If you listen to country music, "Muhlenberg County" may ring a bell, because of the chorus of the song "Paradise", by John Prine.
Daddy won't you take me back to Muhlenberg County
Down by the Green River where Paradise lay
Well, I'm sorry my son, but you're too late in asking
Mister Peabody's coal train has hauled it away
This is no coincidence. Alix E. Harrow references 'John Prine’s 1971 song “Paradise,”' in a footnote. The story of Starling House is not the story of "Paradise", but "Paradise" is where it begins.
Eden (which was Paradise before the fall) is a small town destroyed by coal mining. In it there is a haunted house, Starling House, built by Eleanor Starling on land that once belonged to the Gravely's, the family of coal millionaires who gutted the hills of Eden. Eleanor is long dead, but Starling House remains occupied -- after her death people with broken lives wandered in from distant parts to take the name Starling and to live there. The current incumbent is Arthur Starling. Everyone else in Eden avoids the place -- no one can get in, and rumors say that bad things happen to those who try.
Opal enters Starling House and takes a job as housekeeper. And I'll stop there, so as not to spoil, except for one thing. Near the end of Starling House another Prine song, "Summer's End" plays a role.
The writing is beautiful. Harrow is a detail worker. Every word is carefully chosen and earns its keep. Indeed, she reminded me of Jane Austen's famous description of her own work as
“the little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much labour.”
In no other way does Starling House remind me of Austen. Starling House is, at the start, an exceedingly grim book.
Starling House is a skillfully crafted work of horror fantasy. If this is your genre, or even if it isn't, it is worth reading.