A college student’s summer gig takes a dark turn in Will Maclean’s mind-bending fever dream of a novel, SOLACE HOUSE. 

It’s the early 1990s, and Alex Lane has finished his first year at university. While his wealthy friends are making plans to jet off to Florida and Greece over their upcoming summer break, he’s at loose ends. Alex is broke and apparently without a home to return to, the result of a mysterious, traumatic event he dubs “The Last Day” caused by someone (or something) he describes as “The Annihilator.” With his classmates gone, Alex spends his time lurking about his nearly empty residence hall until the perfect opportunity drops into his lap. The school needs students to clean out an abandoned mental asylum and dilapidated Victorian mansion it has acquired, and a spot on the team has just opened up.

"The ending, which arrives after nearly 500 swiftly moving pages, will undoubtedly prove divisive. But what’s indisputable is Maclean’s ability to spin a compelling yarn that raises serious questions about how we process trauma and grief."

The job is the stuff of gothic nightmares, but Alex is simply delighted to have work. Exuberant, he heads to the old asylum, known as Marshlands, where he meets his motley crew of somewhat thinly drawn coworkers: stoner Clive, devoutly religious Helen, goth girl Rachel, vibrant party boy Malcom, dreadlocked archaeology student/mystic Leo, and a magnetic, red-haired art student named Ella. There’s also a strange, white-haired boy named Adam, whom he recognizes as a fellow straggler from his residence hall. Adam, however, insists that they know each other from “somewhere else.” Alex brushes off the comment, but it’s a clue that all is not what it seems with his oddball colleague. 

Having made quick work of emptying out Marshlands, the group moves on to a more daunting task. They are to clear Solace House of a mountain of accumulated trash, junk and ephemera that would put the Collyer brothers to shame. The mansion’s former owner, Edwin Flayne, who died at the age of 102, was a hoarder par excellence. As the group rids the house of its detritus, they discover his unhinged diaries (“Humans are but haunted meat,” reads one entry), spooky artwork, and an epic, baroque poem. Thus a picture of Flayne emerges. After his mother (also named Ella) disappeared, Flayne became convinced that Solace House existed in a “thin place,” where it might be possible to slip between worlds. He dedicated the rest of his life to finding a way into that “exalted realm,” where he believed he would rediscover the happiness he knew in childhood.

Naturally, Alex and his friends can’t help themselves from trying to unravel the mysteries of Flayne and Solace House. They explore a weird cave decorated with neolithic art, consume vast quantities of drugs --- readers will note the sly reference to Chekhov’s mushrooms --- and generally lose their minds. Is all the weirdness just the result of an epically bad trip? Or is there something truly supernatural that gives Solace House its creepy air? The answer to that question depends on your interpretation of the final section, which follows Alex as he tries to untangle what really happened that summer. 

Maclean has scattered throughout the book, including Flayne’s cryptic poem, quatrains of which appear as epigraphs to each chapter. It all comes together in a fiendishly clever way and casts earlier events in a new light. The ending, which arrives after nearly 500 swiftly moving pages, will undoubtedly prove divisive. But what’s indisputable is Maclean’s ability to spin a compelling yarn that raises serious questions about how we process trauma and grief. This sprawling, ambitious tale seems destined to become a future cult favorite.