"Luckenbooth" by Jenni Fagan

 Year of Publication:  2021

Length:  338 pages

Genre:  Horror

In 1910, Jessie MacRae, the devil's daughter, arrives at 10 Luckenbooth Court, an imposing tenement building in the heart of Edinburgh.  She is there to bear a child for the wealthy couple who own the building.  When things go horribly wrong, Jessie places a curse on the building.  As her supernatural revenge echoes through the decades it draws in the various lonely, lost souls that inhabit the building.  

This novel moves from 1910 to 1999, and is made up of a number of different narrators and stories, impacted to a greater or lesser extent by Jessie's curse.  We hear from, among others, Flora, a lovelorn trans woman, Levi, an African-American from Louisiana adrift in 1940s Scotland, Ivy, an ambitious would-be spy fuelled by revenge, famous Beat author William Burroughs, and Bee, a woman on a murderous quest for revenge.   It's a complex book, at times almost impressionistic and told in an almost stream of consciousness style.  There is a vivid, almost incantatory rhythm to the prose.  Crucially there is a lot of anger here, about long forgotten victims, dreadful crimes that go unpunished, and the depth of human cruelty, particularly male violence towards women.  It's bleak and troubling at times, but there is some light in the dark, love between people which at least provides some solace and hope.  Fagan has a real sense of time and place and it really captures Edinburgh very well.  At times it can be overwhelming and dense, and some of the stories certainly are more interesting than others.  Also it is more disturbing than actually scary, but it is worth your time.  It's a powerful and deeply resonant work.