The Haunting of Maddy Clare by Simone St. James

Publisher: New American Library, 330 pages

Format: paperback

Source: Purchased

I don’t know if it’s a coincidence, but many of the ghost novels I’ve been reading lately are set in the 1920’s.

The decades that followed the Victorian and Edwardian eras into the Interwar years were filled with mayhem and bloodshed and mustard gas and influenza. If ever there was a time for hurt and bewildered ghosts to wander, this was it.

In The Haunting of Maddy Clare, Britain is in mourning. The death toll from the Great War was roughly nine million. The death toll from the 1918 influenza pandemic is estimated between 50 and 100 million, the greatest natural disaster in world history.

Into this backdrop steps Sarah Piper, a lonely, nearly destitute temp agency clerk-transcriptionist. She accepts a questionable assignment with a writer who documents cases of hauntings. Sarah is weary from cold and poverty and cannot afford to turn the position down despite understandable misgivings. When her new employer, observing her wariness, asks her if she does not believe in ghosts, she says, “It’s people I don’t believe in, I suppose” (7).

Right away the reader admires and connects with spunky Sarah. Still, even Sarah is taken aback when her new employer, the rich and daring Mr. Alistair Gellis, explains her new assignment as that of assistant and ghost witness. It seems there is a ghost in the countryside haunting a barn where she is said to have hung herself. The estate owners agree to Alistair’s request to include their ghost, Maddy Clare, in his new book provided the ghost leaves and provided Alistair brings a woman to intervene. Maddy is terrified of men. It turns out that in her lifetime Maddy had good reason to fear men, and now she cannot rest until the mystery of her death is resolved. She has become something of a poltergeist and recently hurled objects at the vicar who tried to exorcise her

But Alistair tells Sarah, “It’s unlikely you’ll be in any real danger” (12).

How’s that for reassurance?

Sarah is pretty terrified of this assignment, but she’s also intrigued. And she’s just as intrigued by the mysterious assistant she’s replacing for the week, one Matthew Ryder, who is at his sister’s house helping with a new baby. When Matthew Ryder makes an unexpected appearance, Sarah describes his entrance as that of a “thief: quick, dangerous, dark-jawed and rough-dressed” (53).

Author Simone St. James imbues The Haunting of Maddy Clare with pulsing atmosphere: suspicious villagers, unstable ghost, unsolved crime, circumspect protagonist, two battle-fatigued men. Energy pulses throughout–some of it courtesy of the apparition Maddy Clare and some of it cached in repressed desire as Sarah begins to care for both Alistair and Matthew. Beneath it all thrums the horrors of a “great” war that continues to haunt its combatants more deeply than any ghost ever could.