Hell
A Novel

Hell is a haunted-house story like no other I've ever read. In the town of 'X', histories intersect and overlap as the narrative shifts between a family (the author's own?) in the 1950s; a doll's house belonging to the eldest daughter; Edwina Moss, the 19th-century writer of a book about household m......more

Here is a gilded puzzle box of a novel, intricate, ornate, meticulously crafted and mysterious. This is a work of virtuosic abstraction, a novelistic fugue that eschews linear plotting and instead braids various motifs around interwoven narrative threads, the most prominent of which include: (1) an......more

I discovered Kathryn Davis via her fantastic story in My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me and now I'm wondering how I missed her all these years. Her work will appeal to fans of Angela Carter (Saints and Strangers)and Kelly Link (Magic for Beginners), and this book in particular reminds me......more

One thing is certain, Kathryn Davis is smarter than me. I read her novel, HELL, as I often find myself reading poetry, as if a foreigner. I let the words build up as sounds, sometimes even with meaning, but mostly with a sense of awe and wonder. There were strains of narrative that I picked up (summ......more