Episode 13.6: ‘Solace House’ by Will Maclean
And so we find ourselves at the end of another season. And what a cracker of a book we finish with!
“In the summer of 1993, broke student Alex Lane joins a team clearing out Solace House, a Victorian mansion bequeathed to the university by a reclusive hoarder called Flayne. The other students are a mixed bunch, but Alex quickly falls into a close friendship with the lively, redheaded Ella.
When the crew begins sorting through piles of junk, they stumble upon Flayne's journals, in which he details his obsession with his missing mother, his discovery of a place called Bewise, and - most mysteriously - his belief in another realm lying parallel to ours, along with coded instructions as to how it might be reached.
As the students delve deeper into the house's secrets, one of them becomes obsessed with deciphering Flayne's strange opus and its promise of another world... and they may be willing to sacrifice everything, and everyone, to get there.”
In this episode we discuss:
Representation of female characters
Pace vs plot vs payoff
When literary and genre fiction collide
Unreliable narrators
You can listen to it here:
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TEXTS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
‘The Secret History’ by Donna Tartt
‘The Cloisters’ by Katy Hays
‘The Ruins’ by Phoebe Wynne
OTHER MEDIA MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
‘Saltburn’
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