Review of Starling House by Alix E. Harrow

Alix E. Harrow is fast becoming an instant buy for me. First, I love that her books are standalone novels. Second, I love that each one feels fresh and different yet retain her signature style. Third … her books are just really good! While she has yet to garner a five-star rating from me, there’s a consistency to my enjoyment of her work that I appreciate. Starling House is no exception: it is a solid, considered, and eminently enjoyable work of fantasy horror.

Opal has raised her younger brother, Jasper, on her own since her mother’s untimely death. They live in a motel room in Eden, Kentucky, subsisting on Opal’s minimum wage job and five-finger discounts. She has better aspirations—at least for her brother, for whom she is toiling to earn enough for his admission to a private school in another part of the state. Just as she is desperate to leave Eden behind, however, the enigmatic and perhaps dangerous Starling House starts to haunt her dreams. She finds herself employed by its sole tenant as a housekeeper, and soon she’s wrapped up in mysteries that stretch back to the beginnings of Eden and the mysterious Eleanor Starling who started it all….

Many of the tropes in Starling House will feel familiar at first glance. You’ve got the mutable, possibly self-aware house. Something inherently magical about the ground on which it’s built, and the need to stand in opposition. A small town with an equally small cast of inhabitants, not to mention your ne’er-do-well corporate outsiders. A legacy of a children’s portal fantasy. On the surface, this book will feel like echoes of numerous others you’ve read, and you might be tempted to dismiss it as a result. That would be a mistake.

First, as I said in my intro, Harrow just pulls off these tropes very well. She’s such a competent writer that it’s really just a pleasure to read her prose. I read this novel in one day, and that’s entirely because I just wanted to keep reading.

Second, Harrow elects to put the emphasis on different syllables of many of these tropes, giving Starling House a cadence all its own. For example, I was expecting Eleanor Starling and The Underland to have a much larger bearing on the plot. Without going into spoilers, it’s still an important element, but it lurks in the background for most of the story instead of being front and centre. Likewise, the actual conflict between Arthur Starling and the Beasts is seldom in direct evidence. In this way, Harrow keeps the focus on the story narrow, on Opal and her relationship to Jasper and eventually to Arthur, and I really like that.

Gotta be honest, though: the whole Opal/Arthur romance doesn’t do much for me. I am, of course, not a romance girlie at the best of times, but the chemistry doesn’t seem to be there. The whole thing feels a little too storybook, you know? Opal’s attitude at the start of the story is that of someone who is seriously inexperienced when it comes to romantic relationships (or deep relationships of any kind). I can only imagine that whatever kind of relationship she might spark with Arthur will be a tumultuous one as they both bring their own baggage to it and both have a lot of learning to do about what it means to be in a healthy partnership. None of this is explored, however, only the attraction aspects, and those are far less interesting.

I’m also not huge on the various antagonists, who feel cookiecutter and almost cartoonish, or the neat-and-tidy aspects to the story’s resolution (the whole will thing was telegraphed quite overtly and very conveniently).

All of this is to say, Starling House has its issues. In lesser hands, many of these issues would be dealbreakers or detract far more from my enjoyment of the book. So take that into consideration as you hear me praise it all the more! Can I explain it? Rationalize it? Hell no. This is one of those books that is more than the sum of its parts. When you try to take it apart, you end up with a mess of tropes and half-baked ideas that, individually examined, don’t look that great. Yet fully assembled and full steam ahead, Starling House is a brilliant ninety-minute film of a book. This is what I am coming to expect from Harrow: fantasy stories that are fun and exciting and, while perhaps not revelatory in their own right, just plain good.