In many ways I am the ideal reader for this queer haunted house novel from the author of the 2022 short-story collection Parallel Hells. As a teenager I was a passionate fan of gothic literature; I love a haunted house novel, and believe The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters’s masterpiece of the genre, is yet to be bettered. It’s an admiration that Leon Craig shares. She also cites Donna Tartt’s The Secret History as an influence, which gives some clue to the setup that greets the reader in The Decadence. Namely, privileged university friends retreat to a haunted country house – inherited, naturally, by one of the group – to indulge in an array of illegal substances and sexual configurations. Bring it on, I thought.
But though I tried very much to care about them, the twists and turns in the characters’ relationships did not make much of an impression. The Decadence is written in a close third person that means we spend the story with Jan, a brittle, self-loathing PhD student whose dissatisfaction with the two female friends she’s been sleeping with preoccupies her to a tedious degree. As for the others, the characterisation is shallow. None of the dialogue feels authentic (“Ursie, you brought the Pimm’s, right?”), there is too much exposition, and the political arguments that the friends keep having feel shoehorned in.
On a sentence level, the book is overwritten, a veritable festival of adverbs and adjectives that left me feeling almost queasy – decadence indeed. “The faint mothball smell that emanated from the light-raked silk curtains cast her back into the realm of memory.” “To love her now felt not unlike being the last adherent of a secret religion, tending to a dwindling sacred flame in hope of the return of a ravenous and uncaring god.”
It’s really hard to write about being high on drugs in a way that is interesting, and The Decadence does not buck that trend, although I’ll admit I did laugh when Jan gropes the “curves and divots” of an air mattress while “thinking about Diana of Ephesus, wondering what it would be like to have sex with a many-breasted nature goddess”. It was meant to be funny, I think? Then there are the errors. I was able to overlook wisteria being in full bloom at the same time as hollyhocks – conceivable, I suppose, though distracting enough for this gardener to be yanked from the narrative. I could even forgive a man peeing being referred to as “ablutions”. But a reference to a character “lying prone on the flowery bank with her hair strewn about her face, as if she were hoping for Millais’ Ophelia comparisons” was almost the final straw.
For a fan of gothic literature, Craig does the genre a disservice in her failure to offer any real psychological complexity. She has intriguing ideas about the violent imprint that the past can leave on a place, and the history of the persecution of Jewish people in this country and beyond, but her exploration is surface-level. By the time Jan is having an unwitting threesome with an antisemitic ghost, having already had a threesome with the antisemitic ghost’s descendant, Craig had completely lost me.
Craig can be really scary when she tries, but these moments are too rare and come too late to truly captivate. The Decadence seems to have been written while in thrall to an algorithm: in her author’s note Craig cites a range of fascinating and important texts, but the influence that looms largest is the social media trend of dark academia. I felt as though I was reading a book comprised solely of vibes, and while vibes can be great, a gothic novel requires something a little more profound to leave the reader chilled, as opposed to relieved, at its end.
The Decadence by Leon Craig is published by Sceptre (£18.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
