Love the slow-burn tension in this book. It gives a sense of threat masked, like tainted meat beneath a spicy sauce.
Saying that the house will be rented to "The right people' feels like a doom or a curse, marking "the right people" the same way that barely-there but bound to get worse lameness marks one of the herd as prey.
I'm asking myself if the rightness based on need or on something else, something that makes the prey sweeter?
The house itself is a twist on the gingerbread house - a lure and a trap.
The Alerdices , brother and sister , seem at first to be the wicked witch, yet something speaks to priest or acolyte rather than witch, in which case, is it the mother, she who must be offered a tray three times a day, who is being worshipped or the house?
Is there a link between the boys cut knee and the revitalisation of the apparently dead plant?
And is the fact that the husband senses but cannot find the taint and will say yes to the house anyway something worthy of blame or something that shows that fate cannot be avoided?
I love being able to close the book at the end of the chapter that brings me a quarter of the way through the novel and ponder these things rather than being rushed to the splatter and gore.
5
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