RAWBLOOD
by Catriona Ward

I wish I’d written this ...

... because it’s the best modern gothic novel I've ever read.

This is magnificent! It's an incredibly well-told tale in which an insidiously haunting atmosphere is established through unusual turns of phrase and careful word choices, where the style of the telling has as much (perhaps more) effect as the events recounted. For me, this initially made it a little difficult to engage with but after just a few pages I got into the rhythm of it and from that moment onward was sucked in and simply could not escape. I read it in two sittings, and was thoroughly irritated by the necessity to sleep, which caused the interruption. As the narrative skipped back and forth between three generations, spanning the 1830s to WW1, I felt myself succumbing to what fast became a palpable sense of dread. Catriona Ward very cleverly builds the tension without giving the game away. There's a lot of gothic lunacy here, so the existence of a supernatural threat remains an open question for much of the novel. Is there really a ghost or just madness? When the answer comes, it's unique and superbly delivered. I've read some fabulous novels recently, but this has beaten them all. I can't believe it's the author’s debut … and I can't wait to see what she does next. Based on this, I will be reading everything she ever writes.

From the publisher

In 1910, eleven year old Iris Villarca lives with her father at Rawblood, a lonely house on Dartmoor. Iris and her father are the last of their name. The Villarcas always die young, bloodily. Iris knows it’s because of a congenital disease which means she must be strictly isolated. Papa told her so. Forbidden to speak to other children or the servants, denied her one friend, Iris grows up in solitude. But she reads books. And one sunlit autumn day, beside her mother’s grave, she forces the truth from her father. The disease is biologically impossible. A lie, to cover a darker secret.

The Villarcas are haunted, through the generations, by her. She is white, skeletal, covered with scars. Her origins are a mystery but her purpose is clear. When a Villarca marries, when they love, when they have a child — she comes and death follows.

Iris makes her father a promise: to remain alone all her life. But when she’s fifteen, she breaks it. The consequences of her choice are immediate and horrific.

Iris’s story is interwoven with the past, the voices of the dead — Villarcas, taken by her. Iris’s grandmother sets sail from Dover to Italy with a hired companion, to spend her final years in the sun before consumption takes her. Instead she meets betrayal, and a fate worse than death. Iris’s father, his medical career in ruins, conducts unconscionable experiments, to discover how she travels in the Villarca blood. Iris’s mother, pregnant, walks the halls of Rawblood whispering to her, coaxing her to come. As the narratives converge, Iris seeks her out in a confrontation which shatters her past and her reality, revealing the chasm in Iris’s own, fractured identity. Who is she? What does she desire? The answer is more terrible and stranger than Iris could have imagined.

The first page:

This is how I come to kill my father. It begins like this.
I'm eleven. We find the mare shortly after noon. She's not been there long, so the foxes haven't come yet. The flies have, though. She is glossy, plump.
"Why?" I ask.
Tom's bony shoulder lifts, indifferent. Sometimes, things just die. He's learned that well. In recent months. The mare's mane is black on the parched turf. Kneeling, I reach a finger to her. Tom pulls me away from the corpse. I expect a scold, but all he says is "There."
I don't see it, and then I do—in a clutch of bracken, ten paces beyond. Small and dark in the green shadow. Newborn.
"What will you do?" I ask.
He pushes a hand through his hair.
"Pest question, Iris. What would you have me do?"
This hurts. "I'm not a pest," I say. "I'm trying to help."
He gives me a gentle shove. "Pest." Since his mother died in March, Tom's voice has been blank.
We watch the foal as it lies, head tucked into itself. It sighs. Thin cotton sides heave. Its coat is still slick in places. It's too small to live, but it doesn't seem to know it.
"We could feed it," I say.
He gives me a look that means I live in a big house with floors shiny with beeswax and high ceilings where the air goes up into white silence and the linen is scented with lavender and tea rose.