Solace House by Will Maclean

On Saturday, In a Land are holding the first session of their book club, Sweating Blood. I can’t go because I’m hiking that day, but I read their first choice of book, Solace House, and here are my thoughts. At the end of the university year, Alex doesn’t move out of his halls of residence. In response, the university offers him a job working with some other students to clear an old hospital. Alex joins a varied cast of characters who are then reassigned to clearing Solace House, a mansion that has been entirely filled with trash. Everyone is aware that there’s something wrong with this place. In a recent Xanaduum newsletter, Grant Morrison described Solace House as “another of those things I stumble across more often these days where the writer appears to have been reading me and Alan Moore when he was younger”. And there are definitely a lot of tropes that I love from graphic novels – it reminded me in particular of Gideon Falls. The publishers compared it to The Secret History,…