Crooked Houses - 'Fairest of Them All' by Albert Power

I found this one heavy going, I must admit. In a way, that's reassuring. Albert Power's prose style is at the opposite end of the spectrum to the spare, post-Hemingway 'realism' that prevails across most genre fiction. Crooked Houses is eclectic in this regard and often challenges the reader - well, this reader, anyway. I had to raise my game to stay with the plot. Which is quite simple, in fact, and falls firmly into the classic ghost story tradition.

A poet called Alistair Parkin - note the authorial initials and the nod to M.R. James - finds himself in a somewhat oppressive relationship with a woman called Verona (a name that calls to mind two gentlemen, of course). Partly to escape her, Parkin resolves to go and visit an old schoolfriend, with whom he once perfected a mind-reading 'act'. He arrives in a somewhat forbidding town to discover that his friend, who used to run an inn, had died in odd circumstances. 

Parkin slowly unearths some facts about his friend's demise, and also becomes fascinated by the teenage daughter of the only other guest staying at the inn. We know from an introductory scene that this interest turns to infatuation and has a deeply unpleasant outcome. It is the process that preoccupies the author, whereby Parkin (who's forty) essentially degrades himself and almost commits a sexual crime against an underage girl. However, the final scene reveals a twist that wrong-footed your humble reviewer and made him reassess the whole tale, for the better.