Sara the Librarian's Reviews > The Various Haunts of Men

Oh this book made me so, so sad. I couldn't sleep last night after I finished it. I was so bewildered and heartbroken by the tragedy and loneliness that pours in torrents out of this book like Noah's flood.

Susan Hill, the author of the single scariest book I've ever read (The Woman in Black) is a wonderful writer who can get you delightfully lost in her worlds. The Various Haunts of Men which introduces her detective, the magnetic but elusive Simon Serrailler, is no exception to that rule. She sets her stage in the idyllic cathedral village of Lafferton where the gentle thrum of daily life is slowly being disrupted by a serial killer. But this is a clever killer, so clever in fact that no one has even noticed the murders are happening.

It takes Freya Graffam, a newly minted detective and recent transfer to Lafferton, seeing the pattern in a series of seemingly unrelated disappearances to convince Serrailler something is even going on. Slowly they begin to surmise that the answers may lie the local new age community who are gaining a foothold with naive locals seeking "psychic surgery" treatments and chakra healing and driving the local health community, lead by Serrailler's sister, to distraction. As they draw closer and carefully laid plans begin to come apart the killer becomes increasingly desperate, and with that desperation comes considerable danger to the very people trying to find them.

Susan Hill has created a truly remarkable place in Lafferton and she populates it with people she wants you to know as intimately as you know a lifelong friend. An entire chapter might be devoted to the morning routine of a single character. Others introduce the reader to incidental characters or characters who would be incidental in another kind of book, but oftentimes they're the key to really understanding why what is happening in Lafferton is so horrible. As we spend more and more time with the citizens of Lafferton and see it through their eyes we come to love it just as much as they do and the barbarity of someone trying to destroy such a simple and lovely world is that much more powerfully felt.

That's what makes this book so outstandingly sad and why, with genuine regret, I must confess that it is the only book in this series I think I'll read. Her characters and this world became so real I actually fond myself feeling real grief by the books end, as if a living, breathing person I loved had died.

The people who die in this world matter. Where in a more generic murder mystery you might be meeting the victim just as the police sent to investigate do here we've just spent three chapters learning all the tiny details of their sad childhoods or their lonely lives seeking an undefinable fulfillment they'll never have the chance to find. When the police arrive at the first victim's home they are startled by the sterility, the lack of personal objects, the oppressive quiet. They wonder aloud how anyone could live in such a chilly place. But we know how hard the victim worked to find her home, how much she loved it and why, how it was here that she was truly happy for the first time in her life. We're the ones, as the readers, who feel the loss the police simply can't. Because they didn't know her.

I just couldn't take the senselessness of what happens to these people and I know that was probably Hill's entire point. She peppers the book with the transcripts of tape recordings done by the murderer as a kind of confession but she's not interested in presenting her readers with a complex, deeply psychologically damaged murderer. The murderer doesn't matter, Hill is saying, why they're doing it doesn't and shouldn't matter. What matters are the lives they destroys and the grief of those who are left behind to bury the dead.

Hill's style is almost hypnotically rapturous. You can feel the heat in a room she's describing and you salivate over the pudding someone is making in their kitchen. Her writing is like that wonderful moment at bed time when you find yourself drifting away to sleep, heavy and soft and comforting. I wanted to be in Lafferton the entire time I was reading this talking to these people and just seeing exactly what they were seeing.

But I felt so horribly lonely and almost anguished when I finally closed the book. Because its also about loneliness and isolation and how we spend our lives labeling people we don't know because they don't fit in with what we think "happiness" should look like. Its about horrible things happening for absolutely no reason to people who do not deserve them, bright futures being extinguished not for some grand plan but just because someone felt like doing it.

That senselessness just destroyed me, just as I think it was meant to. I was left lying in bed just saying "Why?" over and over in my head and knowing there would never be a satisfactory answer because that's the whole point, there never is.

This is a beautiful, poignant to the point of tears story of a beautiful place irreparably scarred by something dark and disgusting that serves no purpose in the grand scheme. I loved it and I hated it and I'm not sorry I read it but it left such an abiding ache in me I simply can't bring myself to visit there again. Like going into the bedroom of a dead loved one and seeing everything left just as if they'll be back any moment, the pain is just too biting and deep for me.