House of Windows

The novel centers around Veronica (young, beautiful grad student) and Roger (65 yr old divorcee, well-established and respected Dickens scholar/professor, who's son Ted had joined the Army and is killed in Afghanistan) and their complex relationship/marriage, the relationships they have/had with their parents, and ultimately the relationships they have with themselves as well. Langan isn't interested in heroes, and Roger and Veronica are painfully human, and he has the courage in a first novel to devote a lot of time to developing them, big fat warts and all. It more than pays off when the strange occurrences at the Belvedere house begin to take place. Langan offers no easy answers or explanations to the happenings, which give the proceedings the weight of reality even as reality breaks down for his characters. And within these shifting threads of the narrative, character motivation, and even of the physical house itself, the idea of story (and how we're defined by story) is everywhere. "Dickens tries to come to terms with his childhood traumas, his adult ambivalences, by writing about them over and over. Hawthorne tries to clarify his Puritan legacy to himself in story after story. Whenever something happens to you-something too much-you create a story to deal with it, to define if not contain it."

It's fascinating that Publishers Weekly, so enthusiastic about Langan's short story collection MR GAUNT (which I have not yet read, but soon will), should be so inexplicably harsh in their review of HOUSE OF WINDOWS. Anyway, pay no attention; heed Lucius Shepard's blurb on the dust jacket instead. This is an intriguing, heartfelt first novel, an effective blend of Straub (JULIA), James (TURN OF THE SCREW), Lovecraft (DREAMS IN THE WITCH HOUSE), with so many other subtle nods to masters of the literary ghost story that the connections themselves become greatly entertaining to classic macabre fanatics (like me). But what Langan does exceptionally well is characterization: his protagonist, Veronica, is one of the more involving central characters of the many novels of this type in recent years; and Shepard is right on the mark when he calls the book a "beautifully observed narrative of two marriages". (But the supernatural elements are wonderfully creepy too!) Occasionally the measured pace might trouble readers who are looking for a "what happened next" moment on every page; but what Langan sacrifices in pace, he more than makes up for in character detail and a caring sense of locale. This is a nuanced and textured novel that deserves much more than the brush-off by Publishers Weekly. I'd give it at least 4 stars, perhaps 4 1/2. Give it a try.