Seanan Maguire tends to write her most experimental stuff as Mira Grant. It just so happens that these are my favorites of her books (notable exception: the Every Heart a Doorway series). In the Shadow of Spindrift House is Lovecraftian to an extreme degree, blending elements of Shadow Over Innsmouth and the Rats in the Walls (minus of course the most racist name for a cat ever ashamedly put to pen) to produce familiar themes, blended with the fun of Scooby Doo and the threat of The Shining.
Harlowe is an orphan whose earliest memories are a vague shape of her parents being murdered. After being kept with her sometimes abusive grandparents for as long as they are able to keep her, she lands with her bestie/adopted brother Kevin, with whom she shares friends Addelaine and Andy. Oh and also they’re a Scooby Gang, solving mysteries for fun and profit. This is probably the only “meh” part of the story for me. The Scooby Gang is a super silly premise that I struggled to believe because the rest of the story was rooted, absent of course the elements asking for willing suspension of disbelief. This by no means hurts the story, because the gang is fun, their dynamic is great, and it’s core to the narrative. It’s just sort of silly.
The gang is on the cusp of adulthood and finds themselves no longer charming to the various authority figures once they made the leap from teen sleuths to just sleuths. Harlowe is the least ready to face this, partially due to her unrequited crush on Addy and partially because she is still gripped by both her need for the mystery solving dynamic and her need to eventually solve the mystery of her parents’ death. Along comes the mystery of Spindrift House, an alleged real haunting and a 3.5 million dollar payday for the sleuths. Shit ensues.
Seanan’s writing ability is on full display throughout this story. She switches voices from the ethereal, spoken history narrative of the framing elements to Harlowe’s broken teen to the angry and ancient spirits of Spindrift as easily as though she’s changing shoes. I don’t know another writer who has such an array of voices at her command in the same way. To experience this: read one of the Incryptid series and then read an Every Heart a Doorway book. She handles the skill of a writer’s toolbox as expertly as a master woodworker.
Definite recommend. This is a thrilling book from start to finish, the characters are all fun and well-developed, and the mystery at the core of the story is satisfying.