The Whistling by Rebecca Netley

I don't read nearly as much horror as I used to, so when The Whistling by Rebecca Netley landed on my TBR pile, I really did look forward to sinking into a suitably unnerving bit of gothic horror. The story, however, could belong to nearly every other gothic horror novel or film released in the past hundred years or so, with a number of checkboxes that include: an isolated Scottish island; an orphaned nanny with a tragic past; a little girl whose twin brother has died under mysterious circumstances; surly locals; a spooky old house with strange goings-on ... You catch my drift, I'm sure.

We follow the doings of Elspeth Swansome, who accepts a post in the fictional Scottish isle of Skelthsea. Her charge is the rather troubled little girl Mary, whose brother William (whom no one, apparently, liked much) died. Her parents are dead, too, and since her brother's passing, she has not spoken a word.

Almost immediately, Elspeth runs afoul of some of the locals, and although she does not at first believe in the supernatural, the spooky phenomena eventually bring her around. She soon realises that nothing is what it seems, and with little else to do but care for a child she comes to love as though she were her own, Elspeth must also untangle the mysterious and tragic past that enshrouds the house and its inhabitants.

I'm not going to go into too much detail for fear of spoilers, but I am going to critique the things that bugged me. Netley's writing is what I would term adequate, so she carries the story well, but the pacing lags considerably. She spends much time creating mood and atmosphere, for which I must give credit where it's due. But then the story gets bogged down in piles of red herrings. When I started reading, I called what the big bad was (possibly based on the fact that I've read and watched a pile of horror in my time) and guess what? I was right. 

While the use of horror tropes to build tension isn't necessarily bad, it's when they're the ones you can see coming from a mile away, including jump scares (which somehow don't quite work in fiction, let's be honest) I didn't find any of the devices used to build tension or terror at all terrifying or effective. I'd hazard to say that this book felt like an amalgamation of every Gothic horror or mystery already in existence, that has been cherry picked for suitable narrative elements. No fresh ground is covered, in other words.

I'd say that if you are new to the horror or Gothic genres, you might find this work fresh and suitably chilling, but alas, I admit my jaded palate has already tasted many similar and better executed flavours over the years. At times I felt that this book would have been better served as a movie than the written word, where the mood and atmosphere could truly come into its own.