I've never reviewed anything from Alcove Press before, but they're an imprint of Crooked Lane, whose horror novels I've been enjoying lately. Their website says that they publish crime fiction and non-fiction but what they've sent is ether gothic, fantasy or romantasy, so I guess they may be branching out. What matters is that this is a really good place to start.

We start out in the past, on Samhain in 1902. A fabulously rich man called Jasper Thorne plans to raise the dead at a huge party at his sumptuous thirty thousand square foot estate located in the Berkshires area of Massachusetts. Surprisingly, it works and his canny woman, Sparrow, raises a hanged man to bind to the house and family. Then we jump forward to the present-day Thorne Hall that doesn't look any different from 1902 because every Thorne descendant takes on a promise to keep it that way, right down to wearing rich period attire. Thaddeus Thorne is the owner now but he's dying and preparing to hand over to his daughter Elegy.

As the title suggests, there's more than just that one spirit. Elegy has to deal with fourteen, a spirit collection indeed, that we later learn were summoned and bound over a six-year period, starting in 1902. They're a varied bunch of ghosts, some friendly, some mischievous and others downright dangerous. On our first night with them, Elegy plays whist with Eugenia and Mabel, dead since the Civil War, and piano with Calliope, just to stop her breaking things. She was even delivered by a ghost, Hester the midwife, so she's been around them literally all her life.

And that makes Elegy a fascinating character. She hardly ever leaves the house, though she can drive into the town of Lenox in the family's 1938 Rolls Royce Phantom, if needs must. Dressed up to the nines in Victorian attire, she's seen as a local eccentric, the latest of a long line of them, and the house is outright avoided as scary, even on days like Halloween. She's never celebrated that and she's never done pretty much anything else that we grew up doing, down to using the internet, but she is aware that the world's there and lives some of it vicariously through what few friends she has, mostly Floss and Hugo, the children of long-standing family friends.

Hugo is also her betrothed, in a forthcoming marriage of convenience that will ensure him his inheritance and her another Thorne to pass the Spirit Collection on to. She likes him as a friend only and he's gay, consumed by a relationship with Sebastian, but they're society and they'll do what they must. There's been a lot of doing-what-they-must in the Thorne family for a long time now. Much of what Elegy must involves keeping these fourteen spirits out of trouble, which she

achieves best by singing ancient folk songs to them, mostly the Child Ballads collected by a Prof. Francis James Child.

Into this unchanging world walks Atticus Hart, the son of Jeremiah, the Thorne's long-suffering handyman, who's called in when one of the spirits floods the kitchen. While Elegy is a naïve and inexperienced girl in worldly matters, Jeremiah is a confident and experienced young man who runs his own business back in Seattle. Of course they fall in love and, while the ensuing romance is expertly handled, it sometimes feels rather simple because there's really nothing much to it. They meet. They fall in love. Everything works out great in the end, even though it doesn't ever look like that's going to happen. The depth is elsewhere.

Mostly, of course, it's in the house; because, while it says romance on the back of my ARC, it's a gothic through and through and every gothic needs a dark sprawling mansion. It doesn't hurt to have a dying patriarch married to a madwoman who's confined herself to the attic. It certainly doesn't hurt to have fourteen spirits who could better be considered revenants given that they can easily manifest physically and interact with their surroundings. While there isn't a curse in the strictest sense, it's hard not to see a life of seclusion dedicated to mollifying family ghosts without even the benefits of modern technology as a curse. What would you call it?

I liked a lot of things here. First and foremost, I liked the setup. Thorne Hall is a sumptuous and sprawling home of my dreams, right down to the library stocked with tens of thousands of first editions and the private graveyard complete with the de rigeur mysterious grave. Did I mention the type of first edition? Yes, that's a first of Shakespeare's 'Sonnets' from 1609. The hardest scene in the book is when Gideon forces kindly scholar Nathan Bride, one of the fourteen, to rip apart some of these most prized works, even knowing that the first of Darwin's 'Origin' was torn up in a previous chapter.

The spirits are a gloriously diverse collection, as if the author took inspiration from the movie 'Thirteen Ghosts', whichever version you like, added one for good measure and let them all run free; with only a metaphysical leash to hold them, wielded by the Thorne in charge. There are a couple of playful children like Adelaide and Reed; through the benign sort Elegy interacts with every day, like the ever-helpful Cook or whichever lady helps her into her gowns on a particular day; all the way to the disfigured burn victim Amos, who rarely leaves the basement, the ominous and grotesque Bancroft, and the thoroughly dangerous Gideon Constant, who enjoys torment. With fourteen in play, none outstay their welcome.

I also liked Elegy. Atticus doesn't have much that takes him past standard leading man for any romance. He's handsome, capable and unyielding in his love for Elegy, even though it came out of nowhere and is immediately tested with a vengeance. I love how she pursues him, not really knowing how to do so, and how he tolerates her eccentricities. She's almost like a time traveller in her trips to see him. She knows intellectually that the world works differently to Thorne Hall, but she's never truly experienced it and Atticus is her opportunity to dabble. Their eventual sex scene is well-written indeed, even peppered with eccentric humour.

There's also plenty of tasty language. J. Ann Thomas writes prose that feels highly Victorian in its use of lush, run-on sentences, but her vocabulary, while impeccably used, isn't daunting to a modern palate. It's like Elegy, old-fashioned but aware of the real world outside. If you like this sort of paragraph, you'll understand what you're in for in 'The Spirit Collection of Thorne Hall':

"Whatever it was, for those five minutes she was a young woman in a beautiful dress dancing with a man who stole her breath and made her stupid while the chandeliers blazed above them and the band played on, and she memorized every second of those five minutes so that in her lonely bed when darkness fell and the Collection came with tooth and claws she could replay it in her mind, feel him upon her skin and in her heart."

Given who Elegy is, I'd have liked a little more quirkiness in background details. There are some delightful moments when we learn about perpetual pills and encounter witch's gardens, but I'd have liked more of this. My biggest problem with the book, though, came very late indeed. The finalé is a good one. While I'd figured some of it out in advance, Thomas sprang a few surprises on me and they were excellent ones. I also appreciated the gentle wind-down afterwards to put the story to bed, but I found that Elegy, who I'd come to enjoy so much, loses almost everything of character after winning through. That may be a small quibble from me, though, because the three-hundred pages taken to get to that point are sumptuous. ~~ Hal C F Astell