The Boy at the Window

From its opening line, ‘I first saw the ghost on a cold autumn night’, this new story from Lucy Strange is thoroughly unsettling and eerie. The setting is Gothic through and through: a remote house wrapped around by swirling fog which shuts out not just the sunlight but ‘the whole world’, within the house a mother and son isolated from one another by grief.  It’s from the fog that the ghost appears, a boy thin like Hugo, but with shimmering skin and hollow hungry eyes. Terrified at first, but desperately lonely, Hugo lets the boy into his house and a strange relationship develops. As the two boys get closer, the words of kindly housekeeper Mrs Stubbs that the living too can become ghosts if they go unseen take on an unnerving prescience. The conclusion to this short novel – published by Barrington Stoke it is adapted for dyslexic and reluctant readers – is genuinely chilling, the build-up carefully managed by the author to leave readers unsure what is real, what is imagined. Lucy Strange’s use of sound and silence is superb, sharpening the sense of claustrophobia and confinement. A story to haunt readers long after the final page.