Carfax House

Ghosts Of
Christmas Past

Carfax House
by Shanni Struthers
Story Land Press
ISBN: 9781838220419

Clocking in at only 160 pages in length, I’m not sure whether Shanni Struthers’ Christmas laced tome Carfax House qualifies as either a novel or a novella but I can say one thing with certainty... and that’s the fact that I’ve had a very good track record this year with Christmas themed reading for the blog. This makes three out of three books I’ve read this season that were all excellent and I’m really pleased that I blind bought so well this year (alas, the same can’t quite be said of the Christmas movies I viewed).

So, just as a caution to temper expectations, Carfax House, subtitled A Christmas Ghost Story, has nothing whatsoever to do with Bram Stoker’s Dracula, despite the titular house and Stoker’s famous abbey sharing a name. So put that out of your mind before you dig into this one... it doesn’t even come up. Instead, it’s the story of a young couple, Liz and Al Greenaway, who have just bought the house, a big property with its own land, as an unexpectedly cheap ‘fixer upper’, isolated and few hours train ride between London and Birmingham. And it deals specifically with the days leading up to Christmas and Liz’s first week in the house, there to begin the gradual renovation of the property while her husband, a London lawyer, finishes up a murder trial before joining her there in their new home for Christmas.

And in reality, there are few characters and a lot of the time it amounts to what is a kind of monologue of Liz as she begins to settle into the place to find that the house is, indeed, haunted by something or someone. Which sounds like it could get kinda dull but, it really isn’t. I was sceptical of this tome at first but Shanni Struthers totally pulled me into the mindset of the main protagonist and made me care about her.

I mean, it’s a grim book, for sure, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Case in point, Liz loves Christmas (like me, these days) and always pushes the boat out to make everything just right. But, as the tale wends its course and you find out that the presence that resides in the house is rekindling the memories and tales from Liz’s own past, you begin to realise that maybe Liz loves Christmas for all the wrong reasons. There is a power to her back story which, once you begin to discover it in the books third act, permeates everything that’s gone before and colours it with new information given.

And it’s got a nice ending too, as it happens. This is still very much a Christmas story and the direction it heads in embraces all that’s best about the season, tempering the negative energy and slow creeping dread of Liz’s childhood experiences to present a conclusion that not only resides in the festive spirit but also introduces the idea of a haunted house that heals... pretty much anyone who has a troubled past... via a tragic Christmas story locked up of its own.

And, short review that this is, I don’t think I want to say too much more about Carfax House other than, it kept me guessing and upended my assumptions about the characters and, as any regular readers will know, that takes a lot of doing in my case (and so I’m delighted that my Christmas reads this year have all included an element of surprise which I didn’t see coming in the first few pages... this is almost a new experience for me). So, yeah... I see that this lady has written a few Christmas supernatural books so, yup, I suspect I’ll be picking up one or two more to review for the blog for around this time next year too. Carfax House is a pretty good read and I’m really glad I’ve discovered another new writer.