Bookseller Reviews
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Enter this weird and wonderful world at your peril!!
“You are about to enter a place of strange genius, possible madness and timeless love”…..count me IN!!
Solace House is a gloriously weird, puzzle box of... READ MORE
A modern classic in the making - breathtakingly smart and deliciously eerrie
It's summer 1993 and Alex Lane has finished his first year of university, he is being kicked out of halls and has nowhere to go and no money to pay for som... READ MORE
A wild trip
Absolutely stunning A wild trip I've never read anything like this before and I doubt I'll read anything like this again. I'm just sad that I won't be able... READ MORE
Wow!
This was incredible!
It's a really complex, metaphysical cosmic horror that builds into something really disturbing. (I very much regretted reading thi... READ MORE
Phantasmagoric and unsettling
What a trip! A psychedelic, labyrinthine puzzle box that I still don't think I've figured out. The 90's nostalgia, the lost summers of youth, a house full ... READ MORE
Fall into the labyrinth
Fall into the labyrinth in Will Maclean’s brilliant, trippy, acid-tinged story of students clearing out a strange house. Strange is the optimal term for th... READ MORE
eerie, unsettling & fantastic
Solace House follows Alex and a group of students who during the summer are tasked with clearing out an abandoned hospital and its buildings. What they fin... READ MORE
What an incredible book
My goodness, where to even begin!This book takes you on a tripped out journey into mind-swirling, brain melting insanity, we begin with Alex, in university... READ MORE
Spellbinding, gripping with a clever conceit at its core,
This is an exhilarating rollercoaster ride of a novel. I’m still reeling and staggering as I close the book after the last page. It reminded me of ‘The Sec... READ MORE
This Book is a “Cramped Cathedral of Lunacy” and I Loved It
I don’t know how to move on after finishing this book. A part of me will always be with this group of people clearing out a house during a hot summer break... READ MORE
A thought-provoking novel that feels like a fever dream
Solace House is a genre-defying novel with dark academia vibes, elements of classic horror and magical realism as well as featuring a time transcending epi... READ MORE
Gloriously weird!
A slow burn, set over the summer of 1993. A group of university students are employed to clear an old house, until recently owned by a hoarder with a very ... READ MORE
Publisher information
- Publisher: Grove Press / Atlantic Monthly Press
- ISBN: 9780802168689
- Number of pages: 512
- Languages: English
Customer Reviews
View allMy new obsession
Summer, 1993, and university student Alex Lane finds himself at the end of the summer term, broke and without plans. When offered the chance to join studen... READ MORE
A Chilling Story of Isolation and Fear
In Solace House, Will Maclean creates a dark and unsettling atmosphere through a tense and carefully paced narrative. His writing focuses strongly on mood ... READ MORE
Clever (in the end), but a real slog to get through.
If I were someone who was willing to DNF a book, I definitely would have DNFed ‘Solace House’ after the first 20%. At over 500 pages, it is a long book—whi... READ MORE
Utterly brilliant, a genre defying masterpiece!
"Swift centuries elapse, now time unbound, repeats, inside everlasting summers..."
A kaleidoscopic labyrinthine glorious beast of novel which defies gen... READ MORE
A dark and mesmerising modern day gothic tale
Solace House is a dark, mesmerising tale that pulls you into a world that you can never be sure as to what is reality or something surreal and sinister.
... READ MORE
"All of us wrapped in our own private labyrinths, prisons half-built for us, half-built by us, our lives.
Will Maclean's new novel begins with Alex. His predicament of not being able to go home for summer is soon resolved when the university offers him a summer... READ MORE
Solace House
4.5 stars
We start with student Alex Lane who, when we first meet him, he is saying goodbye to his fellow students who are all going home for the summer. ... READ MORE
A future classic
Wow! What an amazing book. It's astonishing how words - the right words - can take an idea from someone's head and make it explode into being in the head o... READ MORE
Not for me
There is a good gothic horror novel buried somewhere inside this book, but for me it became increasingly overstuffed and exhausting. A group of students cl... READ MORE
Liminal, isolated vibes with a sprinkling of dark academia
This is going to be SO hard to review. I do not think this book will be for everyone. I haven’t even concretely decided on a rating yet, myself. I’ll admit... READ MORE
Very enjoyable
The plot for Solace House develops gradually, but it does so in a very deliberate way with a lot of little details that add up to the something bigger. The... READ MORE
Dark and Foreboding
Solace House is not a fast read, but slow in the best possible way, meandering and layered, peeling back its secrets at its own deliberate pace. The charac... READ MORE
A Surfeit of Mushrooms 3.5
Initially, and for quite a long time, I thought this was going to be a 5 star read, and that the comparisons with the much lauded Donna Tartt novel, plus t... READ MORE
Incredible masterpiece
The Solace House is a masterpiece.
It’s so clever, so intriguing and engaging. The amount of work and a brilliant mind that went into it must have been i... READ MORE
What a book!
This is the most astonishing book and incredibly difficult to describe. At its simplest it is falls into the gothic fantasy horror realm with a coming of ... READ MORE
Strange, surreal and brilliant!
Wow, and double wow. It’s strange, surreal and brilliant. If I could give it more than 5 stars I would.
Student Alex needs a summer job and is recruited... READ MORE
dark and mysterious
A dark and mysterious novel set in the early 90’s. When a group of displaced university students take a summer job at an abandoned hospital/mansion the uni... READ MORE
Can't stop thinking about this book!
Solace House by Will Mclean completely sucked me in from the very beginning. The opening story felt nostalgic, and almost comforting that made it easy to s... READ MORE
well crafted story
I find it hard to rate this book. On the one hand, I know it's an incredible work of fiction. The author wrote a well-elaborated story and even wrote poems... READ MORE
A Slow Descent into Insanity
I almost don’t know where to begin with Solace House. Straight out of the gate the prose was excellent. The atmosphere that was constructed created this ot... READ MORE
Frantic, enthralling, trippy.
WOW, well, this was a wild ride. My head is still spinning.
Alex Lane, a down-on-his-luck, but slightly charming undergraduate, takes a job cleaning out... READ MORE
Could not put down
A great read, kept me awake as I couldn't stop reading it. Chilling read , but it's written so well. Highly recommend this book.
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