Life is hard in Eden, Kentucky unless your last name is Gravely. The Gravelys own the coal mines that run the town; they’re very happy to remind everyone that Gravely mines keep the lights on. Opal’s last name is not Gravely. Because her mother was a con woman (if she could be said to have any professional at all), Opal’s only family is her little brother Jasper. And Opal will be damned if her little brother will have as rough a life as she has had since their mother died. Alix E. Harrow’s moving and troubling novel Starling House begins on yet one more bad day for our protagonist. The only unusual thing about this bad day is that Opal meets the mysterious inhabitant of Starling House.
There are a lot of stories about Starling house and the strange people who keep the lights on there, going back over a century. Everyone in Eden knows to keep well away from the house and the Starlings, though it’s never really clear why. Opal is about the only person who isn’t absolutely terrified of the place. So when she meets Arthur Starling, the latest and only owner of the house, she greets him with her typical brusque cheerfulness. She even manages to talk the taciturn young man into letting her clean the house (since she’s just lost her job on this very bad day). Arthur knows he should tell Opal to run away from the house and never look back—and actually does this more than once over the course of the novel—the house likes Opal. It’s more than happy to let Opal in even if Arthur won’t.
It’s clear early on that Starling House is more than just an old house with weird residents who never got along with the residents of Eden. Unlike places like Hill House, however, Starling House is kind to folk who are kind to it. What we don’t know is why the house is so, well, alive. We also don’t know why a sinister woman who knows way too much about Opal and Jasper shows up and coerces Opal into taking pictures of the interior of Starling House or stealing the keys Arthur keeps hidden in his room. It’s a little easier to figure out that Arthur’s bad mood and efforts to freeze Opal out come from a misguided sense of duty.
Opal isn’t the kind of person to let secrets reveal themselves in their own time when she has the tenacity to ferret them out. She pulls her few strings to hear more stories about Starling House and even to see some of the Gravely papers that have recently landed in the lap of the local librarian. None of the stories Opal hears are exactly the truth but, slowly, the pieces fall into place to expose terrible secrets hidden for generations and a curse that has grown so large as to prey on the entire town, with the Starlings caught in the middle.
I’m trying really hard to walk that fine line between spilling enough details to intrigue you about this book, fellow readers, without robbing you of the joy and satisfaction of figuring out what the hell is going on along with Opal. I went into Starling House expecting a haunted house story and, perhaps, an author driven mad bound up in the house’s story. I got a lot more than I bargained for when it came to the shockingly realistic characters and the deep emotional bond that develops between Opal and Arthur. Dear bookish people, if any of this sounds interesting to you and you’re in the mood for a book that’ll lift the hairs on the back of your neck, hurry to read this book.