Why ‘The Little Stranger’ by Sarah Waters is a Horror Novel You Need to Read

Why ‘The Little Stranger’ is a Horror Novel You Need to Read

One of my favorite horror novels of the past five years is The Little Stranger, by Sarah Waters. Here’s why.

Top 10 ghost stories

Brian Rowe

June 18, 2019

The Story

The Little Stranger tells of a doctor whose profession, friendship, and romantic interests become entangled with a family living in a house that may be haunted. The novel is told in first person, past tense, double-I from the perspective of a doctor named Dr. Faraday, looking back on a series of unusual events that took place three years prior to when he’s writing his memories down.

At the beginning of the novel, he is summoned to the 18th century estate known as Hundreds Hall to treat a patient, and soon after he becomes friends with the family who lives there, especially Caroline Ayres. When an innocent girl is attacked by a dog, the family son Roderick claims he saw a ghost of some kind in his room before the attack happened. He continues to express sightings of strange phenomena until one night he tries to burn Hundreds Hall to the ground, and is later committed to an insane asylum.

Dr. Faraday begins a romance with Caroline, the same time as her mother Mrs. Ayres takes on characteristics of Roderick, starting to see strange things herself, including the ghost of her daughter Susan who died eight years prior. One night, Caroline discovers that her mother has hanged herself, but despite her overwhelming grief, she agrees to marry Dr. Faraday a few weeks later. But Caroline, like Roderick and her mother before her, starts to unravel in the days leading up to the wedding

The Themes

The Little Stranger has three prominent themes I’d like to discuss. The first is The House as a Character. This is an essential theme for any horror novel about a house that may or may not be haunted — The Haunting of Hill House, The Shining, Hell House — and what may have impressed me the most about Waters’ book is how she really does bring Hundreds Hall to life. A character says at one point,

‘Hundreds is lovely. But it’s a sort of lovely monster! It needs to be fed all the time, with money and hard work. And when one feels them at one’s shoulder, looking on, it can begin to seem like a frightful burden’

The character is not talking about the house like it’s where he or she lives; the character is talking about the house as a living, breathing thing, which is both interesting and a little terrifying. The house is always at the forefront of the reader’s mind, with the knowledge that something horrible can happen at any time. Waters’ description of the house is consistently creepy, like in this example:

I don’t know if the damp and the darkness were to blame, or whether, in keeping away for a while, I had forgotten how really shabby and neglected the house had become: but when I stepped into the hall the cheerlessness of it struck me at once. Some of the bulbs in the wall-lights had blown, and the staircase climbed into shadows, just as it had on the evening of the party; the effect, now, was a strangely lowering one.

The main source of terror in the book is in the mystery of whether or not something ghostly, something venomous, is lurking in a back corner of this eighteenth century house, and so her descriptions that rely on making the place similar to an actual person than a lifeless building give a proper haunted house novel like this one its intensity. Although some of the book’s scenes take place outside of Hundreds Hall, the scariest moments and surprising death scenes are always set in the home, and so the theme is constant from beginning to end, the book’s final lines summing it up well:

If Hundreds Hall is haunted, however, its ghost doesn’t show itself to me. For I’ll turn, and am disappointed — realizing that what I am looking at is only a cracked window-pane, and that the face gazing distortedly from it, baffled and longing, is my own.

Waters makes a great effort to fully flesh out Hundreds Hall to the point that the reader can visualize it, distrust it, fear it, and allow it to become as important a character in the book as the protagonist Dr. Faraday himself.

The second major theme of the book is The Doctor in Horror. Since a doctor can often deal in the grislier side of the human experience, it is a profession often found in the horror genre, both in fiction and in films. Dr. Hannibal Lecter may be the most famous and feared doctor in horror history, but let’s not forget Dr. Frankenstein, Dr. Van Helsing of Dracula lore, and Dr. Seth Brundle in David Cronenberg’s The Fly. Dr. Faraday sees awful things throughout The Little Stranger, and his profession provides a specific point of view to the spooky proceedings. Early in the book, a dog attacks an innocent girl, and Waters writes,

There were no severed arteries to deal with, that was a blessing, but the tearing of the flesh made the job a trickier one that I should liked — my main concern being how to minimize the scarring that would follow, for I knew it would be extensive even with the tidiest of repairs.

Instead of an average Joe as the protagonist who might look at the girl’s condition in a different way, Dr. Faraday’s position and expertise allows the reader for a more involved and specific viewpoint into some of the most horrific moments in the novel. Here’s another one:

My first sight of Mrs. Ayres’ swollen, darkened face made me shudder; but worse was to come, for when I opened up her nightgown in order to examine her body, I found a score of little cuts and bruises, apparently all over her torso and limbs.

The Doctor in Horror theme allows for Dr. Faraday to be present for all of the accidents and tragedies and suicides in Hundreds Hall and examine the bodies in the kind of hard-to-read descriptive ways only horror fiction allows. But his being a doctor also makes him a man of science rather than superstition. If Dr. Faraday was, say, a believer in ghosts, the novel would play out in a vastly different way. As a doctor, he is a man of reason, as he expresses in this example:

‘This house is falling down around your ears! Your brother brought the estate to the brink of ruin and blamed it all on an infection. Now you’re finishing off the job — blaming spooks and poltergeists! I can’t listen to any more of it! It’s making me sick!’

With about 100 pages left in the book, Dr. Faraday is still unwilling to believe in the supernatural when it comes to the strange happenings at Hundreds Hall, an element to his character that is effectively realistic as well as frustrating.

The third major theme in the novel is Mental Illness. Nobody can explain why people are going crazy in Hundreds Hall, so naturally Dr. Faraday and everyone else automatically commits to the mental illness diagnosis, going along with his profession discussed in the previous theme. Waters writes,

Who ever could have predicted this decline? It seemed to me, suddenly, that his mother must be right: no amount of strain or burden could explain it. There had to be something else at the root of it, some clue or sign I could not read.

Since Dr. Faraday can’t pin down a specific illness to what poor Roderick is going through as he claims to see strange shapes in different rooms of the house, he ultimately has Roderick committed to a mental institution. And this sentence for Roderick begins for many of the characters a major conflict in the novel, at one point later both Caroline and the mother believing their son was telling the truth, but nobody ever believing them. And so, again, Dr. Faraday turns to a mental illness diagnosis:

‘My darling, I’m so sorry. This is hard, I know. But it won’t help anyone, your mother least of all, if we avoid the obvious. Things have clearly become too difficult for her. There’s nothing odd or supernatural about that. I think she’s been trying to retreat to an era, that’s all, when her life was easier’

In the 1940s, doctors only knew a small percentage of what doctors know today, and so when they were left without answers for people claiming to see strange things and hear unusual voices were often left with the only diagnosis available: mental illness.

Why I Love This Novel

This is a fantastically spooky horror novel with many great qualities. First off, like Never Let Me Go, The Little Stranger is a literary horror novel, and I love its many literary qualities. The first literary quality I admired was its attention to setting, which often relate to Hundreds Hall:

What horrified me were the signs of decay. Sections of the lovely weathered edgings seemed to have fallen completely away, so that the house’s uncertain Georgian outline was even more tentative than before. Ivy had spread, then patchily died, and hung like tangled rat’s-tail hair.

And then shortly thereafter, Waters writes,

The rest of the wall was not much better. There were several fine pictures and mirrors, but also darker squares and oblongs where pictures had obviously hung. One panel of watered silk was ripped, and someone had patched and darned it like a sock.

A non-literary horror novel would make mention of a few of the house’s qualities, but not as many as Waters makes the time for early in the book, again, allowing the estate to become its own major character.

A second literary quality in the book is its focus on character rather than plot. Unlike many horror novels that focus on a series of scary moments and increasingly tense actions made by the main characters, The Little Stranger is always more concerned with taking many, many pages making the reader care about the characters before anything unfortunate happens to them. Halfway through the book, she still takes the time to give us more about Dr. Faraday:

‘They paid a small fortune for my education, and all I learned was that my accent was wrong, my clothes were wrong, my table manners — all of it, wrong. I learned, in fact, to be ashamed of them’

And with 100 pages to go, she still makes the decision not to let action and terror completely take over, and instead allow Dr. Faraday to be introspective:

I reminded myself that she was exhausted, depressed, still in shock from her mother’s death and from all the dark events that had let to it.

You never get the sense while reading the book that you’re being manipulated by the author or that she’s taking you on a roller-coaster ride that will quickly forget the quirks and motivations of its characters; she lets the characters come first, always.

A third literary quality is the quality of the prose, which is often striking and memorable. One example:

We weren’t used to ruins and broken roads around Lidcote, and the sight of the hollowed-out houses with their jagged, gaping windows, rising eerily through what seemed to be a perpetual city fog, never ceased to depress us.

And a better one:

My mind would go softly across the darkened miles between us, to slip like a poacher through the Hundreds gate and along the overgrown drive, to nudge open the swollen front door, to inch across the chequered marble; and then to go creeping, creeping toward her, up the still and silent stairs.

It must be noted of course that Waters never goes overboard with stylish prose; even in her sections of big, block paragraphs, her sentences are imaginative but readable, a little wordy but clear, never outrageous in its pursuit of the truth.

And fourth, the time period of the book provides a literary quality, its historical post-war era that gives the book so much of its spookiness. Waters writes,

‘The war feels far away now, doesn’t it? How did that happen, in only two years? We had an army unit billeted with us for part of it, you know’

Although a literary novel can be set in the present or future as well, novels set in an historical period, with their attention to detail and their often long, sprawling storylines, are more likely to be literary.

Moving beyond the literary qualities, I was impressed with the compelling protagonist, Dr. Faraday. As I stated before, his being a doctor provides the book a fascinating perspective for a leading character:

A doctor sees lots of tears; some more affecting than others. I really did have a heap of chores at home, and was not at all amused to have been dragged away from them for nothing. But she looked so young and pathetic, I let her have the cry out.

He is smart, capable, opinionated. Also thoughtful, like in this example:

I’ve known one or two [doctors] who’ve seen so much weakness they’ve developed a sort of contempt for mankind. I’ve known doctors who’ve taken to drink. Others of us, though, it humbles. We see what a punishing business it is, simply being alive.

But what I really love about the character is that he’s not perfect, and he has his share of flaws as well. Waters writes,

I began to resent them all. It seemed to me that they had come here, knowing nothing about the house, and nothing about Caroline and what was best for her, yet were making judgments and assumptions as if that were their right.

He gets frustrated and fed up the way a dynamic protagonist should.

Now let’s get to the horror element of The Little Stranger. This is, as promised by Stephen King’s quote on the cover, a terrifying genre novel, so how does the horror actually stack up? There are long stretches of the book where nothing scary happens, a quality I’ll discuss in the next paragraph, but its moments of terror really do shine. Waters understands that the scariest moments in horror literature and cinema are often what you don’t see, not what you do, and she takes that approach to pretty much every moment of terror in The Little Stranger. Waters writes,

Rod stood perfectly still, in that still room, and watched as the shaving-glass shuddered again, then rocked, then began to inch its way across the washing-stand towards him. It was just, he said, as if the glass were walking — or rather, as if it were in that moment discovering its own ability to walk. It moved with a jerky, halting gait, the unglazed underside of its porcelain base making a frightful, grating sound on the polished marble surface.

You don’t quite understand what Roderick is seeing in this moment, but you know it’s horrifying. There is scene after scene of a character thinking he or she is seeing a shadow across the room, something moving and making an eerie noise of some kind, and these are the moments where the book really shines in its horror. But Waters does offer a few moments of good old gruesomeness, like this one at the beginning, after the girl is bitten:

The blood was coming not from Gillian’s arm, but from her face. Her cheek and lip had turned into drooping lobes of flesh — had been practically severed.

And Dr. Faraday’s discovery of Mrs. Ayres I will never forget:

What they saw made them both cry out. It was Mrs. Ayres, slumped and ungainly, her head lolling, her pose queer, as if she had sunk to her knees in a sort of half-faint just inside the threshold. Her face was hidden by her loose greying hair, but as they pushed the door further, her head moved slackly to the side. They could see what she had done. She had hanged herself, with the cord of her dressing-gown, from an old brass hook on the back of the door.

She doesn’t go overboard in her description like Stephen King has the occasional tendency to do; she gives the reader just enough detail to paint a not-so-pretty picture that dwells in the memory far longer than a long, gory description ever would. Waters is more interested in suspense over gore, after all, as displayed in this example:

Next day, re-passing the saloon, she again heard the noise. A rapid drumming or pattering it was this time, so unmistakable that she went right into the room and drew back a shutter.

Again, a noise of something sinister is way scarier than a serial killer ripping off the head of its twentieth victim, and Waters understands how to make her readers’ hairs stand on the top of their heads, often when they least expect it.

I also thought the dialogue was superb throughout the book:

‘Doctor, I’m afraid. If he should grow ill again, what on earth will happen? We’ve already lost so much here. My children try to keep the worst of things from me, but I’m not a fool’

It’s always realistic to the time period, but not overly so, never calling attention to itself.

The foreshadowing of the horror to come is well done in the novel’s beginning, too. Waters writes,

Betty drew back her head from Mrs. Bazeley’s shoulder and said, ‘There’s a bad thing in this house, that’s what! There’s a bad thing, and he makes wicked things happen!’

If the eerie description of the house in the book’s early pages don’t tell you something bad is coming, effective moments like this certainly do.

Lastly, I admired Waters’ blending of captivating romance between Dr. Faraday and Caroline with the horror and suspense. She writes,

She looked like a woman who’d just been kissed and who, to be honest, wanted to be kissed again. But when I moved towards her she took a second step back, and I saw then that her desire had another quality mixed up with it — innocence, or something stronger; reluctance, even a touch of fear.

As discussed earlier, Waters is not interested in delivering The Shining to her readers, a book far more concerned with thrills and suspense than a tender romance at its center. A large chunk of The Little Stranger is very much a heart-wrenching love story, and although some horror writers may have delivered a soapy and sentimental romance that only serves as an important plot point, Waters makes the romance at the book’s center layered and compelling. She writes,

Something made me realize that the journey I was making was the journey I had made back in January, after the hospital dance. I looked at my watch: it was two a.m., on what should have been my wedding-night. I was meant to have been lying in a train now, with Caroline in my arms.

Although the book still would have been effective without the romance, Dr. Faraday’s intense feelings for Caroline provide the book its tragic and memorable ending that in some ways makes the entire journey of the story worth taking.—

Brian Rowe is an author, teacher, book devotee, and film fanatic. He received his MFA in Creative Writing and MA in English from the University of Nevada, Reno, and his BA in Film Production from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. He writes young adult and middle grade suspense novels, and is represented by Kortney Price of the Corvisiero Agency. You can read more of his work at his website, brianrowebooks.com.

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