A woman heavy with child walks out of a stone house before first light and down to the water, where a boatman is waiting. She whispers to the baby that leaving is the only way it will ever be allowed to love. Behind her, the house watches, and begs, and cannot follow. Something with rotten fingernails and red lips clings to its front wall and smiles. That is 1997. The Haunting of Lavender House by Natalie Kikic opens with an escape, and then spends three hundred pages bringing the escaped child home.
The child is Petra, now a grown woman with a camera and very little family left. Her mother has died in a car crash, and among her papers is proof that the grandmother she had been told was dead is alive on Tolba, a small, invented island off the Dalmatian coast. Petra arrives for a month and is met with stares, a sharp-tongued neighbour and a grandmother who keeps asking, a little too carefully, how she slept.
A House With Opinions
The most original decision in the novel is to let the building speak. Between chapters, Lavender House offers its own commentary in brief, fussy interludes, and it is a wonderful creation: a snob about bloodlines, wounded by every empty house on the island, prone to sulking when ignored. It also meddles. Petra’s Croatian, halting when she lands, improves with suspicious speed, and the explanation is one of the book’s neatest jokes. Giving a house a voice is an old gothic wish, but few novels commit to it this cheerfully, and the interludes give The Haunting of Lavender House by Natalie Kikic a wry second register that keeps the darker material from becoming monotonous.
The lavender is more than scenery. An opening epigraph lists what the flower has meant in old floral dictionaries, and the list runs from devotion and faith to distrust. That double meaning is the novel’s whole temperament. The scent that greets Petra as a welcome becomes, by degrees, something closer to a sedative, and the fields that made the family rich look different once it is clear what grew beside them.
Kikić is at her best on the texture of island life. Meals are described with real hunger, from a slow-cooked octopus under a bell lid to fried pastry ribbons dusted with sugar, and the rhythm of mass, gossip and long afternoon heat is caught exactly. When someone hangs a rotting fish in the family doorway as a message, the reader understands how small a place this is, and how quickly it can turn. On Tolba everyone knows whose grandmother quarrelled with whose, and in The Haunting of Lavender House by Natalie Kikic that intimacy is the true source of dread: a ghost is frightening, but a village that has already made up its mind is worse.
The Haunting of Lavender House Belongs to 1895
Running alongside Petra is the diary of Magdalena Derokov, a herbalist whose mother was suspected of witchcraft and who has inherited the suspicion along with the trade. In June 1895 the heir of Lavender House comes to her door at night and asks her to treat his mother in secret. She takes the job for the money and the chance to be respected, and stays for reasons she does not admit for some time.
These chapters are the strongest in The Haunting of Lavender House by Natalie Kikic. Magdalena is proud, funny and frequently unkind, and Kikić never sands her down to make her easier to like. Her diagnostic ritual, embers dropped into a bowl of holy water to see whether they sink, is a striking piece of folk medicine, and the novel is careful to show that the line between village healing and Catholic devotion was never as clean as the priests claimed. The question of how her story connects to the curse drives the second half, and the answer is handled with more nerve than the gentle first act suggests.
The folklore is the real thing, too. The spirit at the centre of the book is drawn from the mara of Slavic and Germanic legend, the night-visitor who presses down on the sleeping, and Kikić uses it as a lens for how a community explains its misfortunes.
Where the Haunting of Lavender House Loses Its Nerve
The trouble with The Haunting of Lavender House by Natalie Kikic lies mostly in the present. Petra sees the same pale figure in several places, in daylight, once even in one of her own photographs, and yet chapter after chapter she talks herself back into blaming jet lag and stress. A sceptic can be a useful guide through a haunting, but this one resets so often that the middle of the book stalls, and a week and a half of the visit is summarised in a few pages just when the relationships most needed room.
The islanders are another weakness. The men who resent the family are hostile and little else, and the gossiping churchgoers form a chorus rather than a set of people. The love story with the neighbour is warm, and it includes one frank love scene, but it follows well-worn steps that a reader of romantic fiction will recognise from the first meeting. The final chapters, after a genuinely ferocious climax, also settle everyone’s future with a neatness that sits oddly beside the cruelty uncovered earlier. Readers should know that the book deals with grief, suffocation, mob cruelty, a violent killing and the loss of an unborn child, though none of it is lingered over for effect.
The Woman Who Wrote the Novel
Natalie Kikić studied Slavic languages and literatures at the University of California, Berkeley, and did not set foot in Croatia until she was twenty, which is why Petra arrives as an adult and an outsider to her own heritage. The Haunting of Lavender House by Natalie Kikic is her first novel, out now from Park Row, and its dedication is to the grandmother she barely knew; Karmela was written with her in mind.
Her Author’s Note is worth reading after the last chapter. It credits the folklorist Luka Šešo, whose research found that the label of mora tended to be pinned on unmarried young women who broke the rules: too pretty, too forward, too free with men. A man who wanted to be rid of a lover could claim she had bewitched him. Kikić took that finding and asked what would happen if such a woman refused to behave, and the whole novel grows out of the question.
After the Last Page
What stays is the house, with its vanity and its fear of being left, and Magdalena’s furious, funny voice carrying across a century. The Haunting of Lavender House by Natalie Kikic is not the most frightening gothic of the season, and its present-day half leans on comfortable patterns, but its heart is in the right place and its anger is earned. Readers who loved the vengeful mother of The Woman in Black by Susan Hill will recognise the logic of its curse, those drawn to a family under siege from its own village in We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson will find a kindred mood, and anyone who remembers the blood-red rhododendrons of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca will see where Kikić found her flowers.
It is a debut about the stories families tell to stay respectable, and the price someone else always pays for them.