This week on the blog I will be soon reviewing The Golden Key by Marian Womack which gets released in the UK tomorrow. I’ve been hearing good things on the grapevine about this gothic fantasy for a while. Here is the summary of the plot and doesn’t this sound enticing?

1901. After the death of Queen Victoria, England heaves with the uncanny. Seances are held and the dead are called upon from darker realms.

Helena Walton-Cisneros, known for her ability to find the lost and the disappeared, is hired by the elusive Lady Matthews to solve a twenty-year mystery: the disappearance of her three stepdaughters who vanished without a trace on the Norfolk Fens.

But the Fens are an age-old land, where folk tales and dark magic still linger. The locals speak of devilmen and catatonic children are found on the Broads. Here, Helena finds what she was sent for, as the Fenland always gives up its secrets in the end…

The lovely people at Titan Books have kindly given me an exclusive extract of this story for you dearest reader to savour

There are many ways of getting lost. Breadcrumbs can sink into the snow, be eaten by rooks.

You can be sucked in by the marshes, lose your way on the flatlands. Be spirited away from the narrow footpaths. You could get confused at the imagined frontier of impenetrable dusk that hangs over the Fens, lose sight of the realm of the tangible.

Samuel Moncrieff had never been lost. For as long as he could remember he had been graced with the intuition that, if you got lost, you might never come back.

It almost happened once. He felt it, a strange force that pulled at him from the lane that cut between the flatlands. He had gone out for a walk; he could smell the cold, the wet leaves. The little shoots of frozen grass crunched under his feet, and the ground was white with frost.

Ahead of him, the dark agricultural fenland stretched, eerily flat. For a second the world had lost some of its gravity, its weight.

He felt suddenly alert, and turned back, pulling with all his might.

He could not blame the fog, for it happened in that uncertain November twilight, impossibly heavy under its many layers of dusk. One step out of place, that’s all it would have taken. Later, he would hear the expression ‘being pixie-led’; but he himself had no words for such a portent, not then at least. Except for the notion of falling into an inescapable void, the unmistakable sensation of darkness advancing in his direction, intent on devouring him. Like drowning in a pool of stagnant water.

That day, the day he had almost got lost.

Was that the day he first saw it, the ruined house that had haunted his childhood dreams?

The dismal construction had been such a fixture of his nightmares for so many years, and yet had disappeared all of a sudden as soon as he put Norfolk behind him, went off to be educated. Almost every night he had traversed its corridors, looked up at the sky through the collapsed ceiling, dreading, always dreading the approach to that mouldy room at the passage’s end. The house stood on a flat stretch of yellow land. The formal garden had run wild, overgrown, and he could hear a faint murmur of water. Some of the outer walls were blackened, and part of the ceiling was gone. The dim light, flat as the land itself, drew endless unmoving shadows.

It was a hollow carcass, home to foxes and mice, and to the jackdaws that flew to and fro around its triangular gables. Branches were overhanging the opened rooms, the floors covered in brown dirt, stones, broken pieces of flint. The dreary salons and bedchambers were all livid with mould, so that the fireplaces looked as if they had been painted in many shades of green by a madman. Ivy had crept in through the windows, and fungi of many different colours, shockingly vibrant, spread their silent empire over the walls, painting maps to unknown realms.

The house spoke of lives coming to abrupt ends, of broken promises. It spoke of endless possibilities, both seen and unseen. Its layers of unmoving time made him uneasy: there was something odd, slightly off-key. You could not hear the birds, the wind rustling. Like a place neither here nor there.

Why had it reappeared now, after all these years, with the inopportune insistence of a long-lost friend one has no time for?

He knew, deep down, what the house meant. A place to escape to, it came back to him during those first feverish hours without Viola, with its faint aura of a long-lost memory; the river accident had triggered its return. Just as mould and decay covered its imagined walls, so the memory of the house had silently conquered his nightmares, leaving no place for Viola, for the treacherous Isis.

What Sam could not remember was whether the building was a true memory, or something that he had imagined, part of some vivid childhood make-believe, a long-forgotten game of hide-and-seek with the shadows. He had no recollection of the property existing in this world. But then, he had been there once, had he not? He could not simply have imagined it, not in all its sumptuous decaying detail.

Samuel Moncrieff had never been lost, and had never wanted to be. It was different now.