She joins Freddie Martinez, a film geek on scholarship hot-tempered, Stephen King–adoring Felicity Chu charming Thayer Turner, whose political family is compared to the Obamas and brooding golden boy Bram Wilding. Soon, she is initiated into the Mary Shelley Club, a tightknit group that requires secrecy and rule-following from its members. After a school party ends in a ghost story, a séance, and screaming, Rachel-who immersed herself in horror movies as a coping device-notices a prankster amid the chaos. The middle-class daughter of a faculty member, Rachel feels invisible except for her one new friend, harmless school gossip Saundra Clairmont. Rachel, a 16-year-old trauma survivor, is initiated into her private school’s secret society for horror fans.Ī year after surviving a violent attack, high school junior Rachel Chavez becomes the new girl at Manchester Prep on Manhattan’s affluent Upper East Side. The ending is satisfying without ruling out sequels. Louisa’s a classic Gothic narrator, her diction recalling genre standards.

Most characters are white, while many are inhuman. Periodic illustrations and excerpts from fictional supernatural texts provide concise exposition. Characters’ emotional connections create wonderful tension. Louisa must help Lee with a mystery of his own and prove he doesn’t deserve a grisly end-or discover if he does. Morningside, and the rest of the residents are. But soon Louisa uncovers just how supernatural the eerie proprietor, Mr. Haylam, and Louisa’s other new co-workers quickly befriend her.

Once they arrive, the crone quickly transforms into the much more proper house matron and manager, Mrs. On the way, they’re joined by fellow Coldthistle-bound travelers: a wealthy (if unpleasant) man and his charming nephew, Lee, who takes to Louisa right away despite the fact that he’s a guest and she’s to be a new servant. After fleeing an abusive, governess-training boarding school, Louisa scrapes by telling fortunes until she’s rescued from a sticky situation by a crone who promises employment at Coldthistle House. In a prologue, Louisa informs readers that she works for the Devil among other odd and cursed employees, cleaning up after the deaths of those who visit Coldthistle House. A runaway works at a boardinghouse for the damned in late-Georgian–period England.

House of furies series