Solace House by Will Maclean is a 512 page standalone novel with a U.S. publication date of October 13, 2026.

Genre

Horror (Literary, Psychological, Occult/Supernatural)

Description

In the summer of 1993, broke student Alex Lane joins a team clearing out Solace House, a Victorian mansion bequeathed to the university by a reclusive hoarder called Flayne. The other students are a mixed bunch, but Alex quickly falls into a close friendship with the lively, redheaded Ella.

When the crew begins sorting through piles of junk, they stumble upon Flayne’s journals, in which he details his obsession with his missing mother, his discovery of a place called Bewise, and – most mysteriously – his belief in another realm lying parallel to ours, along with coded instructions as to how it might be reached.

As the students delve deeper into the house’s secrets, one of them becomes obsessed with deciphering Flayne’s strange opus and its promise of another world… and they may be willing to sacrifice everything, and everyone, to get there.

Opening Line

“So, what are you going to do all summer?” said Marcus idly, through half a sandwich.

My Thoughts

This book is being comped as The Secret History (Donna Tartt) meets The Haunting of Hill House (Shirley Jackson). I found that description pretty apt—except that as I read on, I decided it was a good part House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski as well.

A group of college students in the UK have a summer job cleaning out buildings their university is hoping to purchase and turn into residence halls. One is a long-defunct mental asylum, the other the Gothic-style private home of a hoarder who died years before. A compellingly spooky atmosphere is spun with details like the muffled ringing of an old-fashioned telephone sounding occasionally from somewhere in the cluttered mess, and the fact that battery-powered items unfailingly die when in the proximity of Solace House. Then you learn the former occupant was mixed up in some sort of occult business, possibly in response to the manifestations of his own madness. Eventually the story reaches even further, into the nature of reality/time/life itself. There was an interesting variety of characters and a good build up of tension as the reader feels ever more invested in puzzling out what’s really going on.

A few quibbles are that I didn’t fully understand the ending, the synopsis states the story takes place in 1993 but this fact doesn’t become evident until more than 50% in and doesn’t really seem to be at all relevant or necessary, the story of the MC’s parents also seems rather pointless, and there is quite a bit of poetry included. I realize this last one is a me problem, as a reader, but I am extremely likely to simply skip over poems and song lyrics (ahem, Tolkein) in a novel, even though in this case I could tell the poems were going to be relevant to figuring out important messages in the story. I also didn’t super love our main character (or feel much of anything for them, really), and there was at least one of the students whose involvement in the story seemed completely pointless.

Despite these things, I definitely recommend giving this one a read for the vibes and the deep philosophical thinking it encourages.