I read this book about six months ago but I just had to include it in the Dare You Read It? series as it is about a ghost (or is it?). There was one part, about half way through, that I was reading alone one night after Mr Whisperer had gone to sleep and I was convinced I could hear tapping on the window – it terrified the life out of me!

  The Little Stranger by Sarah  Waters

The Blurb:

 “In a dusty post-war summer in rural Warwickshire, a doctor is called to a patient at Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for over two centuries, the Georgian house, once grand and handsome, is now in decline, its masonry crumbling, its gardens choked with weeds, the clock in its stable yard permanently fixed at twenty to nine. But are the Ayreses haunted by something more sinister than a dying way of life?
Little does Dr Faraday know how closely, and how terrifyingly, their story is about to become entwined with his. Prepare yourself. From this wonderful writer who continues to astonish us, now comes a chilling ghost story.”

  What I thought:

The story is narrated by Dr Faraday, the local village Doctor, in 1940′s rural England. He is called to Hundreds Hall, a huge mansion with acres of land where his Mother was a nursery nurse when he was a boy and he remembers, fondly, the extravagent tea parties and fetes that the Ayres family used to throw for the village. When Dr Farady arrives at the house after not having seen it for decades he is shocked at the crumbling and delapidated state that it’s in. The owners of the property are now Mrs Ayres and her two children, Caroline and Roderick (both in their twenties); her eldest child, Susan, died 30 years ago aged nine. Faraday has been called to see the maid, Betty, who is complaining of stomach problems and saying that she wants to go home, but when Farady delves deeper he finds out that it is because she is hearing strange things in the house and she is scared. Farady is invited to have tea with the family and this is the start of a friendship with the family just at a time when things start going bump in the night……

Despite casulaties of the spooky goings on a-plenty, Faraday managed to find an explanation for everything: the fires, the writing on the walls, the tapping etc. What frustrated me was that while this was going on I was expecting things to start falling into place and make sense, but it never did. I am no more clued up now that I was when I started it. What I think Waters has done is left readers to make up their own minds about what was going on in the house. Where there really ghosts or was the family in melt-down as well as the house? The book is set in post WWII England, on the eve of the NHS, when class is becoming less important and the upstanding members of the community aren’t necessarily only those with wealth anymore: Mrs Ayres still likes Betty the maid to dress in full black and white and courtsey etc which is even starting to be amusing to members of her own circle. With the going’s on in the house, we are left to wonder whether their really is the pitter-patter of little ghosty feet or whether the demise of the house is mirroring the demise of its occupants?

I would definitely recommend this book as a really good read. I was reading late one night and put the book down just after an episode of tapping on the walls and was drifting to sleep when I swear I was woken up by tapping on my bedroom window! It could have been a dream, but hey……..you never know!

Spooky rating:

Although this book wasn’t actually scary per se, the ghostly goings on in the middle gave me the chills while I was up reading late one night.

Good spooky parts but the book won’t turn your hair grey with fright.