The Black House [Paperback]

The Black House tells the story of a middle aged couple, the Mundays, recently returned from nearly a decade in Africa where the husband was an anthropologist studying a tribe called the Bwamba. They've returned, ostensibly because of his heart trouble, to a dreary cottage in a small and not terribly friendly town where he can work on his book. Disturbing things began to happen almost immediately; figures are seen peering in windows. A Bwamba spearpoint dissappears from a collection passed around at a public lecture. And Munday's wife begins to suffer from unexplained maladies.

To tell more would be to reveal too much of this wonderfully dark and horrific tale. If you're a fan of the ghost stories of M. R. James (as is Theroux) or such classic tales as "August Heat" or de Maupaussant's "The Horla", read "The Black House" for a treat.

There is a prevailing tone of despair, even damnation, to Paul Theroux's ghost story, THE BLACK HOUSE. Munday is a pathetic creature, a surly egoist unable to make or keep friends or to fill his roles as husband and scholar. He allows the trappings of his identity slowly to be stripped away until he is only a shadow of his formerly serious and professional self. He invites an African acquaintance to Four Ashes for a visit, but Munday, under the influence of this growing malaise, becomes suddenly embarrassed by the very sight of the man and abuses him at every turn. Though clearly he needs no help at it, some of his new neighbors are more than willing to aid Munday's decline: while giving a presentation at a local church about his anthropological work in Africa, a valuable and dangerous Bwamba artifact is stolen from him; the theft drives Munday to distraction, sensing that if he should ever see the object again it will not be under happy circumstances. The great irony which unfolds over the course of the novel is that this anthropologist, who considers it his vocation to make one African tribe comprehensible to the outside world, cannot himself adapt to the simple community of Four Ashes. In placing himself above small town life, Munday rejects the basic principals of social integration, thus making himself ideal prey for the mysterious Caroline.

The quality of Theroux's writing and the dark mix of psychology, intense sensuality, and metaphysical unease place THE BLACK HOUSE in the estimable company of Richard Adams' THE GIRL IN A SWING and Robert Aickman's "strange stories." This is a territory in which unexpected and inexplicable episodes drive the narrative: Munday glimpses two mutilated dogs under a tarp in a local man's garden; a woman applying for a maid's position at Bowood House leaves information leading the Mundays to the wrong address; the scorching eroticism of Caroline's surprise visits threaten to leave the Mundays' home in flames. Such incidents accumulate over the course of the novel, tempered by Theroux's cool but entrancing prose. From this grows a palpable tension that--perhaps in keeping with its nature--never actually resolves. One almost anticipates the novel's vague, indecipherable ending, a point at which Theroux compels his readers to share, for a moment, Munday's banishment to a maddening limbo.