I picked up the book because I loved the series and, embarrassingly, only found out through Tiny Bookshop that it was based on a book - very loosely though, as I've now discovered. Despite my initial confusion about the deviation from the series, this book sucked me in. Jackson manages to create such an eerie atmosphere that you start noticing the smallest sound in your own room 🫣 (i might be too weak to become a regular horror reader) Some of the creepy bits were great, but often the plot quickly moves onto something else without an explanation of what actually happened. I wish it would linger a little more in those moments or come back to them for some sort of reveal. Following Eleanor's mental descent was probably the most unsettling. Even in the beginning she has an almost constant erratic inner monologue due to social anxiety (relatable 🥲), and later on her traumas and insecurities seem to be read and used by the house to manipulate her. The other characters were also generally well written, I especially liked the banter between the 4 housemates at the beginning. It was strange however how some arguments seemed to come out of nowhere and some conversations felt a little unnatural or immature to me. Overall though, I found the book very atmospheric and engaging, I would have liked more in-depth explanation or revelation about the 'darkness' inside the house and a little bit more realism in the interactions between the characters.

I agree with the people here who said it was difficult to judge this book. I wouldn't recommend it outright to anyone because it took me 500-600 pages for the story to become interesting to me, especially 'Volume 1 - Mr Norrell' was so slow and politically convoluted for most of it except for a few passages, that I almost stopped reading. But because I bought a physical copy I committed to it, hoping that it would get better. The two main characters remained almost entirely unlikeable to me until the end. "The name of one shall be fearfulness, and the name of the other shall be arrogance", a quote from the book, describes it very well. I was much more interested in the fates of several secondary characters, who got picked up from time to time, including Stephen Black, Arabella Strange, Mrs. Pole and Childermass. Susanna Clarke is clearly talented at building elaborate worlds that nevertheless feel realistically grounded by weaving historical facts into the story (setting during the Napoleonic Wars). However, the extensive use of footnotes could have been much reduced for my taste, I didn't always feel that it added much to the story for me, and sometimes they were so long that I was thrown out of the actual story. The writing style didn't bother me, as I happened to have read Austen shortly before anyway and felt it was very appropriate for the setting of the story. Clarke is clearly talented at this. Due to the extremely slow pacing in the first half of the book, which in itself is the length of a normal book, I am forced to give 2.5 stars. Maybe I'm just not the right reader to enjoy such a long exposition. Nevertheless, I admire Clarke's imagination and eloquence.