A Night with No Stars [Hardcover]

Sally Spedding's chiller-thriller, A Night with No Stars (2004) is set in the mountains of Mid-Wales. I know these mountains. I know the way the Welsh talk English in Rhayader, I know the language of the chapel and the attitudes of suspicion that abound in the country as whole toward the English, the Saesneg. Sally Spedding captures the cadences of speech. She captures the beauty of the landscape--in bad weather a very bleak beauty. I have rarely seen it as bleak as it is in this novel. Spedding colors the scene to creepy effect it with words out of the Celtic heritage, Samhain, the Celtic Halloween and Beltane, the Celtic May, with people who dabble in Druidic myth--and with the dreadful ravens always hovering in the background, deeply symbolic in Celtic mythology, as the "heroine" of the novel learns. This central character, Lucy Mitchell, is not Welsh, but she has read a book in her childhood, Magical Tales from Magical Wales, and has an interest in Celtic beliefs; she has also (surprisingly) written a dissertation on the Welsh poet, R. S. Thomas, whose view of Wales is considerably bleaker than that of her Magical Tales, but when in the first chapter of the novel she is brutally and humiliatingly assaulted in her workplace, an upmarket publishing house in London, she sets off with a small inheritance to buy a property in Wales, hoping to find rural peace and Celtic regeneration. (She should have read R. S. Thomas more closely.)
Like characters in other Spedding novels, she is an outsider with a dream about to turn into a nightmare. The closer she gets to Wern Goch, the house on the Ravenstone estate that she wants to buy, the more her happy fantasy of the rural life fades, and the greater her fear grows that she going in the wrong direction, but simultaneously greater grows her sense that she cannot turn back. When she reaches the turn-off on the road to her dream house, the track on which she is driving becomes narrower and narrower, and so she goes on deeper and deeper into trouble and less and less able to turn back, and we with her. The other characters in the novel are introduced early on in their own voices though in third person narratives, thus Mark Jones, the son of the house owner, handsome, crazy, a poet, a laborer, a man with strange rapport with the huge ravens that inhabit the land; other characters too, not even in Wales, whose connection with the central plot is still a mystery. There are secrets in Wern Goch that Lucy begins to know about, but no one will explain them to her. The wife of the owner, mother of Mark, was horribly murdered fifteen years before in this house, but why? By whom? We, the innocent readers are early caught up in the plot, tantalized by the pieces of mystery that are dropped into our laps, reading on, guilty of going with Lucy on this dangerous path, guilty of wanting to know the worst, not comforted by the small suggestion of a new order at the very end, our heads and consciousness saturated with the horrific images that have "solved" the mystery.
This is not a novel for the faint-hearted. It is a first-rate chiller-thriller for those who know what the genre has in store for them.