#MacmillanAudio Review: Starling House- Interview with author Alix E Harrow

Today I'm featuring a fantastic, one of a kind novel, a Southern Gothic light horror tale.
Enjoy!

ASIN: B0BVKWJ267
Publisher: Macmillan Audio
Release Date: 10-03-2023
Length: 12 hours- 26 minutes
Source: Publisher for review
Buy It: Audible/ Chirpbooks

ADD TO: GOODREADS

Overview:

A gorgeously modern gothic fantasy from the New York Times bestselling author of TEN THOUSAND DOORS OF JANUARY.

I dream sometimes about a house I’ve never seen….

Opal is a lot of things—orphan, high school dropout, full-time cynic and part-time cashier—but above all, she's a determined to find a better life for her younger brother Jasper. One that gets them out of Eden, Kentucky, a town remarkable for only two things: bad luck and E. Starling, the reclusive nineteenth century author of The Underland, who disappeared over a hundred years ago.

All she left behind were dark rumors—and her home. Everyone agrees that it’s best to ignore the uncanny mansion and its misanthropic heir, Arthur. Almost everyone, anyway.

I should be scared, but in the dream I don’t hesitate.

Opal has been obsessed with The Underland since she was a child. When she gets the chance to step inside Starling House—and make some extra cash for her brother's escape fund—she can't resist.

But sinister forces are digging deeper into the buried secrets of Starling House, and Arthur’s own nightmares have become far too real. As Eden itself seems to be drowning in its own ghosts, Opal realizes that she might finally have found a reason to stick around.

In my dream, I’m home.

And now she’ll have to fight.

Welcome to Starling House: enter, if you dare.

A Macmillan Audio production from Tor Books.

My Review:

Starling House
Alix E. Harrow

 

Harrow’s latest light horror/fantasy is Fantastic, a Southern gothic fable like story filled with ghosts, goblins, evil doers, heroes, flawed characters and one heck of a haunted house. Opal, the star of the show is about as flawed as you get, yet she will pull at the audience’s heart strings because under the hard-nosed exterior is a vulnerable little girl who just wants to be loved and a champion for those she loves. Arthur is a close second to Opal and his fierceness to be the last warden of Starling House is heroic. There are other unforgettable characters in the book both good and bad, including the house itself. The narrative has an easy flow and a steady pace, the settings are creeptastic and the whole shebang will hook readers from page one until the riveting end.

Narration:
The audio version is unmatched, the narrator Natalie Naudus, is fabulous at playing all the characters in the book, but she really, gets Opal to a tee. She gives her listeners a vivid acoustic depiction of the book painting every scene with perfection while expressing every emotion at the just the right moment.

 

Opal McCoy and her little brother Jasper live in Eden Kentucky, known for having extremely bad luck (which they have had personal experience with) and the haunted decrepit mansion known as Starling House. A house for which there are many stories about involving unexplained deaths, strange beasts roaming the grounds and its strange original owner, children’s author Eleanor Starling. Opal’s main objective in life is to make sure that her brother gets out of Eden, and she’ll steal, cheat, lie and use any means at her disposal to make sure that happens. She’s even enrolled him in a fancy private academy, now she just has to find a way to pay for it. Which brings her to the gates of Starling House, a house that for some unknown reason she’s dreamed of all her life, now however she’s just hoping to find work there. What she finds is, Arthur Starling, a recluse and present warden of Starling House, a lonely boy/man who offers her a job, demands that she not talk to anyone about the house or him and pays her way too much for the work she’s doing.
But lately there are even more strange forces at work putting Eden and its residents at more risk, making the house restless and leaving Opal with some important decisions to make.

Interview with author Alix E Harrow

Alix, hi! Welcome to The Reading Frenzy. I LOVED Starling House.
Tell my readers a bit about it please.
Thank you so much!

Well, if I only had five seconds, I’d call it a “southern gothic Beauty and the Beast.” If I had ten, I’d say it’s a dark fairytale about the home I loved, hated, and ultimately left. If I were talking to my friends, I’d say, “remember that movie Beasts of the Southern Wild? Well it’s kind of like that but in Kentucky, and there’s a bad cat.”

You are a new to me author but believe me that will soon change.
a. Do you write to please your audience, or do you write to please yourself?
I think if I was truly pure of heart and wrote only for myself, I probably wouldn’t be published! I would be writing gorgeous and inscrutable novels deep in the woods of Maine, burning each page as I wrote it.

b. Did you have a target audience for Starling House?
I read an interview with Silvia Moreno-Garcia where she said she wrote books for the “classy but trashy reader,” and I immediately stole it. That’s who this book is for—people who read both leatherbound Gothic literature and those sexy little paperbacks where a woman in a white dress is fleeing from a spooky house.

Opal was a hoot to read.
How was she to write?
A hoot, pretty much. I mean, she’s all the things I love in a woman: mean and funny and bad and tough. But we only really love a tough character when they crack, and those little moments of vulnerability were by far my favorite.

Starling House the house was such an enigma.
Did you have all the particulars of the house worked out from the start or did the house take the wheel sometimes?
The house was nothing but vibes, at first, a sort of collage of all the haunted, enchanted, or possessed houses I’ve read before--with a little bit of the actual abandoned house my husband and I had bought and fixed up in rural Kentucky. Rooms and their histories appeared at need—which is sort of how the House functions, now that I’m thinking about it.

But it always had an attic room, and it always had a locked cellar.

I listened to the Macmillan audio version and I have to tell you that Natalie Naudus nailed it all, but especially Opal. I could hear the snark, the vulnerability and all the other [Opals] in the book.
Do you get to have any input in the narrator selection?
Oh I’m so glad you asked about Natalie! I got to know her through bookstagram, and because she’s narrated some of my favorite recent books (if you haven’t read Shelley Parker-Chan’s books…). But then it turns out she lives in Virginia, not far from me, and we’ve gotten to meet up in real life a couple of times. Tor asked me if I had any preferences for narration, and she was my first pick!

After you finish a book do you do something special to celebrate?
I usually fall into a weepy funk when I turn in a book, which is cured only when my husband peels me off the floor and takes me to the library and feeds me Thai food and reminds me that I always feel this way. Then, of course, comes the real celebration: starting the next one.

Alix thanks for answering my questions
Will you be touring for Starling House?
It was a total pleasure! And yes, I get to do a US tour, and I’m so excited! My full schedule is here.

 

 

About the author:

A former academic, adjunct, cashier, blueberry-harvester, and Kentuckian, Alix E. Harrow is now a full-time writer living in Virginia with her husband and their semi-feral kids.
She is the Hugo Award-winning and NYT-bestselling author of THE TEN THOUSAND DOORS OF JANUARY (2019), THE ONCE AND FUTURE WITCHES (2020), a duology of fairytale novellas (A SPINDLE SPLINTERED and A MIRROR MENDED), and various short fiction. Her next book, STARLING HOUSE will be out on 10-03 2023.
Find her on instagram (alix.e.harrow) or subscribe to her newsletter: https://writtenworld.substack.com/