Book Review: "The Night Guests" by Marina Scott

When our narrator's father dies, her mother retreats into solitude and writes constant letters to him. She is mourning and sad until the family members attend a seance together where the showman in front of them looks on with a confusion as he states that the father of the house has returned and confirms he has been receiving the letters. Our cynical narrator doesn't know how this man in front of them could've known her father's nickname without even asking any questions. The question is will the events of the following story turn a cynical woman into a believer in something more, something beyond? As her mother begins to take up her hobbies again, our narrator finds it strange and odd that there is a different air to her life now. A completely different air.

Nina Wilson is the narrator of this ghostly book in which Leroy, a man who holds a seance, speaks to the father of a drowned boy. He also speaks to Nina's mother regarding the father who has since died. Ever since the seance though, Nina has been seeing the ghost of the young boy almost everywhere. As she continuously drowns in their family's crippling debts and tries to pawn her jewels for services such as sleeping aids - she begins to realise that perhaps her only hope is to talk to Leroy again and ask him to help out. Her mother has been acting strange, and Nina herself is continuously seeing a ghost who asks her for something she doesn't have. Atop of this, Nina hasn't seen her twin brother Amos in around a year as he was 'sent away' to an institution. Her life is falling apart.

Nina is such a relatable character even though she lived during the early 1900s in Omaha, Nebraska. She seems to be a 25-year-old woman being pushed to the absolute edge but still, holding it together. The symbolism of riding a bicycle is similar to when Mary Elizabeth Braddon uses the symbolism of riding a horse - for women it is a progressive activity which resembles or communicates a sort of sexual freedom. Perhaps this is the tension presented in the conversation regarding the bicycle, the riding over to Leroy and the way in which she notices his strange movements towards her. For this, I have to say Marina Scott has done this theme some serious justice. I am in awe of some great writing talent, it's not too obvious but immersive enough to keep the reader interested.

Leroy suddenly is invited to stay with Nina and her mother, now that her mother has retracted into the world of the dead in order to see the dead father, Nina has only realised that Leroy could help her. Unfortunately enough for Nina, her mother and Leroy become obsessed with each other, not invited Nina into the room where Leroy is doing his work. When Nina hears her mother walking around at night and spending more and more time with Leroy, she writes to her twin brother who is far away about her troubles. One of her troubles is that she can feel her bedroom moving further down the hallway. Not knowing what kind of ghost child Leroy has brought with him, Nina is terrified of all the strange things that are happening in her house nowadays. She sees the grey-lipped child everywhere. And now he's probably in the house.

The writing is tense, slow and burning with emotion. Originally, our protagonist puts it down to grief but after a while, she is less and less confused about her position. When she tells the housemaid, she is believed. There is something terribly wrong here and yet, there's a smoke screen in the way. Nina can't see what she doesn't know, and she can't understand a man she's not fully aware of. Who is Leroy Marshall? Does she really know at all? When things start to change around the house, everything becomes different and not entirely in a good way.

To be honest, I was quite astounded by how many genres were blended together in this book. For one, there's historical fiction in which I definitely felt like I was taken back to the early 1900s American machine. Then there was gothicism, where I felt like the atmosphere was very much heavy and dark at times with supernatural happenings. After this, we have family drama in which we have a generational trauma that pervades the undertones of the text. Finally, we have the unreliable narrator of female sensationalism - she seems to only tell us what we need to know in the moment - perhaps for the sake of reputation or maybe she too, is hiding something from us.