Reviewed by Phoebe Bush
Rot can infect more than a house and its walls, sometimes it can also effect the people, within.
Content Warnings: Sexual assault, violence/gore, gaslighting, discussions of colonialism, race, and eugenics, sexism and misogyny.
Welcome to High Place, where you shall travel with protagonist Noemi Taboada as she goes to save her ailing cousin from her strange in-laws, their stranger rituals, and their strangest of all house. This book may only just be 300 pages, but it will have you in a vice, throughout.
Noemi Taboada is a fun protagonist, a savvy starlet in her early twenties who is not your usual screaming final girl, but still finds herself wildly unprepared for the Doyles – a pale, old-world family, whose values stand firm in their decaying home. Virgil and Francis are two of the most interesting in this family, mirror images who grow in differing directions from their twisted patriarch.
It is through these characters that various themes are explored, such as racism, colonialism, and sexism, which all grow from the same rotten place. This is especially interrogated by having the horrific setting not in the usual United States or Europe, but in South America, instead.
This gives a whole new layer of thematic relevance to the setting of High Place, as a house that is built on colonialised land, and the bodies of local workers.
And such an atmospheric, haunting setting it is, too.
The house is where the plot really escalates, crawling along and building to a horrific climactic point. The pacing is steady enough to keep the reader satisfied, but also full of dread, a dread that grows until the reader both wants to know and does not want to know the truth. As for the ending, usually I have a bone to pick with endings, but this one in particular is well deserved, a relief, and very fitting after all that the characters have to endure.
That being said, I do still have some bones to pick.
In this book, internal and external dialogue can sometimes take away from the tension of the narrative. This includes a lot of clutter about philosophers, musicians, fairytales, and gothic references, which I think takes away from what this story is trying to be, on its own. Also I feel that varied hints could have been used to point out some of the particular plot twists and turns, instead of a handful being reused and recycled, repeatedly.
But if you are looking for a spooky read and haven’t quite had your share of haunted houses, then this unique horror story may still be worth the read!