FRIGHT FEST #4: The Shadow Guest - Hillary Waugh

In the 1970s there was an explosion of Gothic suspense novels mostly appearing in mass market paperbacks. You didn't have to go to a bookstore to find any of them, you could buy these book in Woolworth's, local drug stores, newsstands and train station book stalls. There were ubiquitous. To some extent they still are as I find them by the dozens at library fundraising sales, used bookstores and estate sales.  The stories were even more formulaic than traditional detective novels with the exception of the addition of supernatural or quasi supernatural incidents. In the better neo-Gothics the supernatural events are genuine but in the majority of them they are always rationalized.  The formula can be summed up in a quip that is attributed to Donald E. Westlake (or was it Elmore Leonard? or Mike Avallone? or who?) that goes like this: "A gothic is a book where the girl gets the house."

In The Shadow Guest (1971) Hillary Waugh inverts the entire formula by first making the lead character and narrator a man. Howard Whelan, a successful architect, finds himself in charge of a large building project in England. He takes his new bride Angela with him to London. He hopes her odd depressive persona will come to life in a new setting. Back in New York she was under the care of a psychiatrist who approves of a new setting as part of her recuperation. Angela is the woman in peril of the novel, but as she is not the narrator the story is enlivened and rises above the usual formula of the neo-Gothic.

Waugh even starts his book with an homage to a HIBK narrator. Nearly every sentence in the opening paragraph starts "If only I had..." the usual signal that terrible things we are about to read about might never have occurred if Howard had seen everything the way it really was. I smiled at this opening paragraph and dismissed it as a semi-parody of the entire genre. Big mistake. Howard was telling the truth and the reader really should be paying attention to how the story unfold.

Cliffside home reminiscent 
of the Whelan's house
(© William Dax/SWNS)

Shortly after they arrive in England Howard has a heart attack. His doctor tells him he has been working too hard and stress lead to his attack. He loses leadership over his project is told to take a hiatus from work. It is even suggested that he leave London and find a home far away from hectic urban life. Angela is excited to look for a new home and she finds one in the lonely house built by a forlorn seacoast. With much cajoling and prodding Howard gives in to her desire to move in to Heather Cottage. The girl gets the house, just as we expect, and very early on. But not without a load of trouble.

Because -- of course -- Heather Cottage is a house with a past. Soon Angela is seeing visions, hearing horrible sounds, and is drawn to ghostly apparition that appears in the yard outside. But Howard also sees the apparition and hears the terrible sounds. He does his best to assuage her fears.  But if he is also seeing and hearing these supposed hallucinations is there a real ghost at work? One night they hear what sounds like a car crash but when they go out to explore they find no sign of a car wreck.  All the more disturbing because they know that a few years ago a car came careening down the hill above their house and smashed through a guardrail plummeting over the cliff and ending in a fiery crash on the rocky shore below. Are the Whelans being haunted by that crash and is the apparition a ghost of one of the crash victims?

Waugh tells a creepily effective and engaging story loaded with suspense.  Nearly everyone they meet has some inside dope on Heather Cottage's previous occupants or something about the horrible car crash. Slowly but surely we are provided with just enough information to keep reading in order to find out what actually happened. Questions were flooding my mind as I tore through this book. Did someone survive that crash? Is there a bizarre vendetta taking place? And why?

Added to the weird haunting and the riddle of the car crash is Beverly Gaines, the Whelan's young housekeeper, who may have a psychic power. The first day at Heather Cottage she is frightened by a vision in the sitting room and flees in terror. It takes some time to calm her down and when she re-enters the house it's as if nothing ever happened. She has no memory of being frightened or seeing anything strange. When Howard questions some of the locals about Beverly he discovers she is shunned because of  her deadly premonitions. She had a similar vision on the road where the car crash happened. Howard is warned that if Beverly saw something in their house they should be careful because it is a sure sign that someone will die there soon.

Then there is the mysterious painter who lives in a house on the hill above the Whelans new home.  He is a reclusive, distrustful of almost everyone, and won't allow anyone in his home. Howard meets him in a very strange scene that leaves the reader thinking something very strange is up with the hermit-like artist.

The rear cover of my paperback edition of The Shadow Guest  quotes a newspaper review that states "...At no point does the enthralled reader have the slightest suspicion about the horrendous climax." For once, that's no exaggeration. When the utterly unexpected twist occurred I shouted aloud, "WHAT?!" It is a near brilliant achievement.  Although the ending seems rushed and overloaded with twists and double twists, all is explained cleverly and succinctly. It was all there if we -- like Howard -- had only been paying attention to what was actually happening.

As the only example I know of a neo-Gothic told from a male viewpoint that simultaneously subverts and pays homage to all the conventions and motifs of this genre The Shadow Guest succeeds magnificently. I was truly impressed with this book. Waugh was so successful with this book he went on to write a small batch of true Gothic novels that were published under his female pseudonym "Elissa Grandower."  I also read The Secret Room of Morgate House (1977) to see if he was as innovative with the genre. Sadly, it's too much of a clone of the hundreds of books that cling to the Gothic suspense formula. The Shadow Guest because it basically is an inversion of a neo-Gothic is far more original, innovative and --dare I say it?-- ingenious in its conception.