I shouldn’t need to convince anyone who enjoys high-quality fiction to read a new novel by Kaaron Warren. She’s one of the best contemporary writers of horror, not just in Australia but internationally, as evidenced by her winning several major genre prizes, including The World Fantasy and Shirley Jackson awards. Warren’s latest novel, The Underhistory, is, in my humble opinion, her finest work. Which is saying something.

It’s 1941, and 10-year-old Temperance “Pera” Sinclair watches a plane crash into her house. It kills her family and their friends, including the visiting Prime Minister and his wife.* Fifty-two years later, Pera Sinclair has spent most of her inheritance re-building the family home: the Sinclair House. Now, she runs tours through the apparently haunted house, each room a memorial to a member of Pera’s deceased family, including her husband. But while the house might not actually be haunted — despite the games Pera plays on her guests — it does hold secrets. And when, unexpectedly, five escaped prisoners invade the house, those family secrets emerge. Violently.

While The Underhistory isn’t a haunted house novel (no ghosts or weird temporal and spatial anomalies, ala, The Haunting of Hill House), it has a similar texture and shape. Because what are ghosts if not the memories, the joy and trauma, soaked into the walls and rooms of a house. To emphasise this, Warren structures the novel around each room within the residence. It’s an effective way of peeling back, revealing Pera’s troubled, traumatic history — one that she seems all too willing to revisit, a crusty but poorly healed wound that she’s constantly scratching. It makes for a complex portrait of a woman shaped by tragedy. 

We see Warren at her very best in the last third. I’ll hold back on the spoilers, but Pera’s confrontation with the escaped convicts is tense, gory and brilliant. This might be literary horror, but it’s literary horror with a sharp bite. The Underhistory is likely to be one of my books of the year.

* It’s worth noting that the novel is set in Australia. Neither Menzies nor Curtin (the Prime Minister in 1941) died in such horrific circumstances. This is really the novel’s only “speculative” element.