Starling House (2023) is Alix E. Harrow’s newest fantasy, this time a contemporary gothic featuring a former coal-mining town in Kentucky and a fictional creepy children’s book called The Underland, written by an E. Starling. Harrow describes it as a “southern gothic beauty and the beast, sort of”. It was a Reese’s Book Club selection, and a Nominee for the Goodreads Best Fantasy of 2023.
Opal, a twentysomething woman who lives in a motel in Eden, Kentucky with her high-school age brother, after their mother died in a car accident several years ago, was obsessed with The Underland as a child. But now she’s a high school dropout who works at the Tractor Supply, has no vehicle so she bicycles or walks everywhere, and is doing her best to make sure her brother, Jasper, doesn’t have to stay in Eden.
The house left by the author of The Underland is in Eden, and everyone thinks it is haunted, but Opal dreams about it and is drawn to it–the wrought-iron fence, the starlings that are always there, and the grandness of the several stories of limestone. But if she asks anyone about it, no one has anything good to say about the house or the people who live there.
One day while she is taking the shortcut to work (which happens to go by the house) she meets the current resident, Arthur, a youngish man who looks like he never sees the light of day, and he offers her a job as a housecleaner, paying a lot more than her current job. Wanting to build her brother’s escape fund, she takes the job and spends every day at Starling House.
But then, of course, strange things start to happen. A woman in an SUV shows up and confronts her, asking for information about the house and photographs of the inside. The back of the property abuts the power plant and the river, so it is prime real estate for an expansion. Opal and Arthur become friends, of a sort, and Opal begins digging into the archives at the library to find out more about E. Starling and the owners of the power plant. Opal finds out more than she anticipates, including some of her own origins.
It’s set in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky, the location of John Prine’s song “Paradise,” which is about the effects of strip mining. Harrow has taken the seeds from the song, and added her magic. It’s beautifully written and wonderfully creepy. It’s completely weight-neutral (as are her previous books, The Ten Thousand Doors of January and The Once and Future Witches) and she includes positive representations of both characters of color and queer characters.
I highly recommend Starling House. Alix E. Harrow is on my “must always read” anything they write list now. Her newsletter is also worthwhile. I’m looking forward to a release of her two previously-published novellas in one paperback volume on February 13, 2024, Fractured Fables.
Reading While Fat 