Dark Observation by Catherine Cavendish
I would like to thank Anne from Random Things Tours and Flame Tree Press for an advance copy of this novel in exchange for fair and honest review
Publisher – Flame Tree Press
Published – Out Now
Price – £9.95 paperback £4.99 Kindle eBook
Eligos is waiting…fulfil your destiny
1941. In the dark days of war-torn London, Violet works in Churchill's subterranean top secret Cabinet War Rooms, where key decisions that will dictate Britain’s conduct of the war are made. Above, the people of London go about their daily business as best they can, unaware of the life that teems beneath their feet.
Night after night the bombs rain down, yet Violet has far more to fear than air raids. A mysterious man, a room only she can see, memories she can no longer trust, and a best friend who denies their shared past... Something or someone - is targeting her.
Horror is often about the breaking of this cosy sense of things we call reality. The disrupting force that unsettles and scares us because we often just don’t understand why bad things happen. Horror doesn’t always have to be supernatural (just look at the news on a regular basis) but when something unearthly causes the problems that does mean the impact on us is far stranger. In Catherine Cavendish’s new horror novel Dark Observation we have a multi-generational tale that combines the horrors of WW2 London with the stranger dark powers that live outside reality to a very satisfying chilling effect.
Violet is the elederly grandmother to Heather and as she enters her 90s is being treated to a luxurious break in London a place where Violet used to live and work. One that carries many memories of WW2 and her work for the Cabinet War Rooms. But a trip that was supposed to be a fun walk through warm nostalgia brings up darker and stranger memories that seem to haunt Vi who never fully recovers and passes away afraid to leave her home. A picture of a strange beautiful woman that Heather finds in Vi’s belongings is named as Sandrine Maupas di Santiago and her mother passes down the tale of how Vi met her during the war and labelled her the most evil woman she has ever met.
This is a wonderful eerie piece of historical horror that really works thanks to Cavendish’s storytelling. Sometimes with horror people forget to actually make us care about the characters and here by focusing initially on Heather and Vi’s initial trip the reader gets a subtle overview of the family history and the dynamics we get to see between all the geenrations as warm likeable people with a clear family bond. The feelings of love and grief in these opening chapters make us invested in our charcers and care for what we are about to experience. From the off though we get shadowy half-glimpsed figures, changing landscapes and timeslips all suggesting that something very supernatural is approaching.
The main tale though is set back in WW2 and here again Cavendish makes us experience initially the daily terror and grind of air raids, the perils of rationing and allows us to imagine what life would have been like working in the Cabinet War Rooms without daylight and occasionally requiring overnight stays in rat infected bedrooms. It feels right and not wallowing in nostalgia to show the terror people felt on a daily basis with the the added worry that when you came out of an air raid shelter your home and possessions would be gone.So of course lets ice that cake with something dark and malignant that cannot be explained!
What we get next is a slow build of eeriness as Vi soon stays with her best friend Tilly in their rented house that is also shared with a mysterious and haughty foreign guest who comes and goes when she pleases – Sandrine Maupas di Santiago. Primed to worry about this woman thanks to the present day storyline we know something is going to go wrong between Vi and Sabrine but the question is what?. There is a slow and steady build up of weirdness from the constant banging of a drum in an apparently empty room to strange dreams ehere Vi imagines herself (or so she hopes) shrunk to the size of a mouse being watched by Sandrine and her mysterious partner Alex who seem to now take a constant interest in her family. The uncomfortable build up of horror is how Vi’s reality is causally played with; roads, people and memories can be apparently altered on a whim and no one bar Vi spots the changes. The tension continues to be increased until we move from WW2 drama to nightmarish tale of cults, myths and dark powers all of which have poor Vi in her sight.
What impressed me is that this is a story where unusually everyone get suspicious about strangers as it is wartime and it’s initially unclear if the simple explanation is that Sabrine is a spy rather than anything else. We get a cat and mouse game being played between Tilly, Vi and the British Government and Sabrine ans whoever she works for. One fascinating idea is that back then people really were encouraged to provide detailed daily observations of what they saw that went to the government and now this story created a dark mirror of that. It’s a super strong section of the novel and when we realise we are dealing with far more dangerous supernatural forces we now see Vi is very much on her own and the final set of scenes are extremely uncomfortable and full on horror. My only wish is the finale back in modern times felt a little rushed when there feels so much more of this world to explore and would love to know what happened next!
Dark Observation is a highly enjoyable horror tale using its historical setting and adding some particularly chilling and dark secret history on top. Great characters really invest you and I think this feels a perfect autumnal read for the incoming dark nights when you’re all alone reading that book….or are you?
