Sinister secrets
Debut suspense novel blends shades of Poe and Hitchcock
Houses can be welcoming or forbidding, expressing their owners or oppressing them. Catherine House does a little of both.
Elisabeth Thomas’s debut novel is about an exclusive private university, but you might say it’s also about an experiment in social distancing: Here it’s done among one group of students and faculty over a period of three years. The outside world is kept at arm’s length — although, as it turns out, the sickness is inside the house.
Like most of her classmates, Ines is on the run from her own demons and regrets. She barely passed high school after getting pulled into a spiral of drugs, parties and dissipation. Ines applies to Catherine House in an act of desperation.
It’s an great privilege to be accepted. Politicians, judges, artists and presidents have passed through its halls. Its gracious, historic campus provides students with every need — food, board and books. And tuition is free.
The exchange rate is steep, however. Incoming students must agree to cut off all ties with their previous lives. There are no trips home and no visitors. Not even keepsakes or little mementoes are allowed. Students are provided standard-issue clothing, along with new roommates and friends.
A meditation runs through the novel on the significance of individualism and free thought — how “belonging” can become another facet of oppression.
The school entices the most vulnerable sorts of young people, preying on their insecurities. Ines, brought up by an indifferent, indolent mother, craves the shelter of a family — which Catherine House seems to offer.
At first, Ines barely studies and frequently skips classes. More lethargic then rebellious, she sleeps in and sleeps around, opting for private pleasures over communal belonging. Her roommate is a model student, labouring over her classwork with a kind of rigid, petrified intensity. Like so many of the students there, Baby is chronically afraid she’s not good enough, terrified she’ll be exposed as an impostor.
With its cultlike fixation on control and secrecy, it’s clear from the outset that something is deeply wrong with Catherine House. The narrative feels haunted by a sense of decay and fear. Ines is frightened by the mess of her own past, and lulled by the sense of structure and hope the school represents. Catherine House paints itself as a new kind of family home, along with a funhouse mirror simulation of a “family.”
At times, the narrative stretches a bit thin, repeating certain motifs as the characters roam the halls, entering one mysterious room after another. But the novel compensates for redundancy with some wonderfully horrific and truly shocking discoveries within these locked antechambers. There are shades of Edgar Allan Poe and Alfred Hitchcock as suspense builds in the winding corridors of the house and the twisting turns of the psyche.