Book review: The Animals at Lockwood Manor

Jane Healey's new gothic novel is an offering to classics like Jane Eyre and The Woman in White, with a zoological twist.

Gothic, historical fiction is exactly my cup of tea, especially when it comes packaged in such stunning artwork. I am so grateful for the finished hardback copy which I was so kindly sent by Pan Macmillan - those sprayed edges really are something else!

The Animals at Lockwood manor became my first read of the UK coronavirus lockdown, and I felt a strange kinship with Hetty Cartwright. As she packed up the taxidermy and other specimens from the Natural History Museum's mammal collection and evacuated with her beloved animals to the countryside, away from the coming Blitz, I was newly arrived at my parents' home, having hastily packed my things and fled my busy apartment block in search of a better chance at social distancing.

Luckily for me, though my parents' house is Victorian and a bit dilapidated around the edges, it's nothing like as sinister as the country estate which awaited Hetty.

Country house settings really are some of the most iconic in literature, and Jane Healey has played into this trope with gusto, creating a mansion so unsettling its presence looms over the human - and animal - characters who inhabit its vastness. Lockwood Manor is enormous, with ninety-two rooms (or more...), mostly shut up with dust sheets hanging ominously over the furniture.

To Hetty, a thirty-something shrinking violet whose entire life revolves around preserving the animal collection, the many rooms are simply destinations for the specimens: the parlour will hold the Insectivora, the writing room is for the Cetacean bones, et cetera. I liked Hetty with her hyperfocus on the animals, and habit of talking rather bluntly about mammalian classification rather than making small talk. She would probably identify as neurodivergent these days.

The estate's two aristocratic residents, Lord Lockwood and his adult daughter Lucy, have very different approaches to their sprawling home. Lord Lockwood spends most of his time shut up in his private office, whereas Lucy is plagued with a neurosis of sorts which has her constantly counting the rooms, tracing a path around the building in an endless cycle which prevents her from sleeping. Her mother, recently dead along with her grandmother, was 'mad' and had a similar obsession, roving between rooms, terrified of a mysterious figure dressed in white.

It quickly becomes apparent that Lucy's troubled mind is entirely justifiable: within hours of arriving at Lockwood, one of Hetty's prize specimens goes missing, beginning a chain of disappearances, reappearances, strange movements and inexplicable intrusions. The sensible Hetty, desperate to prove herself to the museum, starts to come understandably unstuck, falling victim to nightmares and paranoia just as she tries to reassure Lucy that there is nothing to be worried about.

It seems like the female members of the household are inexorably drawn to searching the house, frantically looking for something without always knowing what. Lockwood with its secrets and its seemingly endless rooms becomes this unmappable space, opening and locking itself as if consciously hiding something. It's very disorienting for the reader and utterly chilling.

The animals only add to the chilling atmosphere. Hetty loves her animals and Lucy marvels at them, but I can't imagine anything worse than being trapped in an already-foreboding manor house with a menagerie of dead animals, their glass eyes staring out of the cases! Their constant shifting - whether it's a stuffed bear losing its skin, a small specimen turning its back overnight, or something disappearing altogether - makes one seriously wonder whether this novel is going to veer down the path of magical realism and bring their moth-eaten, dried-out forms to horrifying life.

This fear is only augmented by the fact that the 'woman in white' so feared by Lucy's mother appears to have manifested from the legend of a wild woman who commanded a coterie of beasts...There is a constant sense that Lockwood, this bastion of aristocratic civilisation, is being encroached upon by the natural world. Foxes and shrews sneak around the corridors at night, storms leak in through the roof, and grisly dead creatures crop up in unwanted places including Lucy's recurring nightmares of a wounded hare. Along with the taxidermy, death seems uncomfortably present in the house.

Lucy's deceased mother, though absent from the action, is ever-present on the page. She is a distillation of references to gothic fiction: originally from the Indies, and a known madwoman like Mrs Rochester; she fears the ghost-like woman who has haunted her since childhood; she has died under suspicious circumstances. I was fully expecting her to turn up in an attic room at any moment, but luckily the author wasn't relying that heavily on her predecessors. Although, if you've read Jane Eyre and Rebecca you may be able to make some educated guesses.

Many aspects are clearly written in homage, but the novel offers enough of a twist to keep itself fresh and to keep the reader from fully guessing the horrors at its core. For one thing, it was refreshing and heartening to have Hetty and Lucy's relationship take centre stage. Author Sara Collins wrote that her book, The Confessions of Frannie Langton, was designed to offer the representation of race and sexuality that her favourite gothic novels are sorely missing. The Animals at Lockwood Manor is written in the same vein, preserving all the hallmarks of classic gothic fiction but asking that 'what if?' which allows for a broader representation of identity.

I found Lucy and Hetty's budding relationship very sweet, although I will say that I found it quite hard to picture both women. Personally I would have preferred a little more physical description, though I did love the introduction of Lucy with her 'fever haircut', an unfashionably short crop which hints at illness or even madness.

Overall, I found The Animals at Lockwood Manor a very enjoyable and absorbing read, with a real sense of mounting fear at where it was all going. There were many, many red herrings, and the denouement came suddenly and from a bit of right angle, though once the secrets started unravelling I realised how they had all been hiding in plain sight.

Much like Michelle Paver's Wakenhyrst, if you want a straight answer about the creepy goings-on in this monstrous house you may be disappointed. But in many ways I admired the focus on very human horrors: perhaps the moral of the story is that in a gothic house full of creepy taxidermy and rumours of ghosts, the most mundane things might turn out to be the most frightening.

My rating: 4 stars

You can also read my reviews on Waterstones.com here!

If you liked this, try:

• Wakenhyrst by Michelle Paver

• The Familiars by Stacey Halls

• Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

• The Confessions of Frannie Langton by Sara Collins

• The Wicked Cometh by Laura Carlin

• The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters