This is the first time in a long time that, upon finishing a book, I immediately went back to the beginning to start reading again.
Bewildering, strange, uncanny, funny, romantic, nostalgic; Solace House contains multitudes. Beginning as a fairly familiar tale of a lost university student (with hidden tragic past) who meets a gang of unlikely misfits over a long, hot summer. Alex is our protagonist, at times wise and mysterious, and at others almost painfully adolescent, and he is cleverly written to be relatable whilst withholding pertinent information from the reader.
The Solace House crew, whom he ends up working with over the summer, are almost on the edge of caricatures, before Maclean deftly re-focuses them as more complex individuals.
This is a long read, and some might be put off with the sometimes meandering pace in the early part of the novel, but I really enjoyed the slow build-up of unease and the slyly dropped hints that make a second reading so rewarding.
I could see myself returning to this book over and over, trying to wheedle out new meanings and discover more hidden codes... I still don't think I've quite figured it all out, but I'm enjoying the challenge.

The plot for Solace House develops gradually, but it does so in a very deliberate way with a lot of little details that add up to the something bigger. The conclusion was really enjoyable, and the brief scary moments at the beginning worked well. I was curious to learn more about the house and the man who lived there, much like the characters in this book. A very enjoyable read.

Wow, and double wow. It’s strange, surreal and brilliant. If I could give it more than 5 stars I would.

Student Alex needs a summer job and is recruited to join a group to clear a manor house ready to be assessed for its suitability for use by a university. Amazed by their initial discovery, and the realisation that this will be a far greater task than they envisaged, they set about it with enthusiasm in the hope of finding ‘treasure among the trash’. They are to find that the house has a far greater mystery to reveal. With a penchant for some members of the crew to experience the effects if hallucinogens I found myself not quite knowing which was reality or which illusions – or delusions, which added to the mystique. This continued to the end which left a vagueness leaving it open to the reader’s interpretation.

Atmospheric with a well-written imaginative storyline; and truly amazing is the poem, this was ingenious, a fantastic achievement.

Thank you so much to Will Maclean, Atlantic Books and NetGalley for the opportunity to read an advanced copy of this book.

Thank you so much NetGalley for the ARC 🕯️

This is gothic horror mixed with dark academia and psychological thriller energy but really it’s a puzzle box of a novel that slowly messes with your head.

It digs deep into obsession, forbidden knowledge, madness, fractured realities and toxic group dynamics. There’s this eery sense that something isn’t quite right, like the walls are shifting when you’re not looking.

It captures that obsessive, morally grey academic environment where intellect and obsession blur in to something deeply unsettling.

I love a book that makes me feel a little unsteady and completely obsessed at the same time. This did not disappoint.

Will Maclean is an impressive talent. His previous work; ‘The Apparition Phase’ of 2020, was a groundbreaking gothic ‘rites of passage’. ‘Solace House’ is a similarly ambitious, genre-defying novel that blends mystery, speculative fiction and dark academia into a richly layered narrative. Set in the summer of 1993, the story follows university student Alex Lane in his summer job clearing out a dilapidated Victorian mansion acquired by his college from the estate of reclusive Edwin Flayne. What begins as an ordinary task quickly deepens into something much stranger as Alex and his companions unearth Flayne’s cryptic journals, chronicling an obsession with his missing mother and his belief in a parallel realm—complete with coded instructions on how to enter it. Maclean’s prose is atmospheric, evoking the lazy heat of an endless summer while slowly tightening its grip with unsettling revelations. Fans of ‘The Secret History’ and ‘The Haunting of Hill House’ will find familiar resonances here, yet ‘Solace House’ ultimately defies easy comparison, carving out its own eerie territory. The novel’s sprawling structure and philosophical underpinnings invite contemplation. Those who relish immersive, thought-provoking fiction will be much rewarded by this mysterious, haunted house story.

I was a big fan of Will Maclean’s previous novel, The Apparition Phase, and also his work on The Broken Veil podcast, so I was very excited to see this one come up on NetGalley. There are definite similarities to The Apparition Phase here, with the narrator being a somewhat gauche young man hung up on an idealised woman, but this is a much more ambitious book. The marketing is understandably citing more popular novels that people this century have actually read, but for me the clearest antecedent is William Hope Hodgson’s The House On The Borderland, with its vision of an eternal structure buffeted by huge cosmic forces. There’s something of House of Leaves in here as well, even The Haunting Of Hill House with the idea of the house being a representation of a character’s psychic space. It probably has something in common with books that don’t also have House in the title as well, but who cares about them?

Of the everyday elements, the depiction of long student summers in the nineties rang very true, and the relationships between the unlikely company that assembles are very entertaining, but where the book really flies is when it engages with the supernatural experiences laying behind the mysteries. There are huge pinwheeling visions of eternity, labyrinthine paths and connections and endless recursiveness as almost everything of any substance in the book is echoed and paralleled elsewhere, and then echoed again in its turn. In years to come there will be huge exegeses online trying to bring them all together, but I warn you, you’re going to need that meme of the guy with the chaotic noticeboard and the red string connecting hundreds of documents and photos.

Is it perfect? No, there are definite flaws - there are two characters early on whose only purpose seems to be to highlight the naivety of the narrator and they feel like are dangling in the wind by the end, and the key character arc for Ella is there to serve the narrator rather than achieve anything in her own right - but these are tiny pebbles against a vast mountain of enjoyment. Maclean is rapidly becoming one of the foremost practitioners of weird fiction in the UK, and I can’t wait to see what he does next.