This Chaotic, Confusing, Mad World

Jacob Babb reviews Alix E. Harrow’s “Starling House.”

By Jacob BabbFebruary 6, 2025

• SF

I WAS 14 YEARS old when I first read Stephen King’s The Gunslinger (1982), the first novel in the Dark Tower series. I picked it up in the Walmart of my small town in rural North Carolina, drawn more by the author’s name than anything else. I was captivated from the earliest pages of the book by the way King infused his strange world with elements from our own, like a piano player in a saloon playing “Hey Jude.” Michael Whelan’s beautiful illustrations drew me in even deeper. I can still see the crow sitting on the gunslinger’s shoulder in my mind just as clearly as the first time I read the book. I was convinced that King had built this chaotic, confusing, mad world just for me, a kid who didn’t know another soul who had read this book. The way he mashed together genres—fantasy, Western, horror—felt magical to me. I was a Tower junkie from that point forward.

As adults, we often chase the highs that we experienced as children. We may read things that bring about echoes of some of those initial formative experiences, but it is rare for us to feel those feelings of discovery and magic once we have built our own personal interior libraries. Our exposure to different stories over the years makes it hard to us to experience that sense of wonder again. Hard, but not impossible.

As I read Alix E. Harrow’s Starling House (2023), I felt the familiar sense of wonder that I first experienced as a young reader of genre fiction. The novel really isn’t like The Gunslinger at all. It isn’t a weird Western set in a world of alternate Arthurian legend. To the best of my recollection, there isn’t a single slow mutant or villainous man in black in the book. But in Harrow’s gothic fantasy, just as in King’s novel, there are other worlds than these.

Starling House draws on the genre conventions of gothic novels, haunted house stories, and tales of families that bear a dark secret. However, it is set in rural Kentucky, a world defined by economic struggle and poor access to health care and education. Protagonist Opal, the narrator of most of the book, is a young woman who works a part-time job at Tractor Supply and lives in a hotel room with her younger brother Jasper. She took on parental responsibilities for her brother when she was a teenager, after the death of their mother, and while she is doing her best, she does not have enough money or opportunity to improve their lives.

Despite being a high school dropout, Opal has availed herself of the local public library and the mentorship of librarian Charlotte to build her own education. She is reminiscent of Jade Daniels from Stephen Graham Jones’s Indian Lake Trilogy (2021–24), whose encyclopedic knowledge of slasher movies serves as her lens for interacting with the world around her. Opal’s knowledge is not encyclopedic, but she nevertheless relies on her knowledge of gothic tropes as she finds herself more deeply involved with Starling House, an eerie, neglected mansion that is home to Arthur Starling, heir of the mysterious family that has inhabited the house for generations. She is also familiar with the literary work of Eleanor Starling, the town’s sole celebrity, who published a children’s fantasy novel called The Underland that appears, as the novel progresses, to be more than just fiction.

Starling House sits just out of sight of the town’s residents, fueling gossip about the house as well as its residents, who exhibit hermitic tendencies. Arthur has groceries delivered to the gates, making no effort to become a member of the community. The house itself seems just as resistant to visitors as the Starlings, with the notable exception of Opal. Drawn to the gates by the mysteries that surround the house, Opal cuts her hand on the iron gate, and it seems to drink in her blood. This encounter with the property draws Arthur out, and when he sees that she has wounded herself there, he tells her to run.

Dreams of the estate begin to haunt Opal’s sleep. When she is eventually driven to return to it, she notes that the property looks like “God scooped it up from the cover of a Gothic novel and dropped it on the banks of the Mud River, and I still like it far more than I should.” She recognizes something ominous in the house’s nature, but she feels profoundly drawn to it. Seemingly in spite of his own better judgment, Arthur agrees to hire her to clean the house, which has become filthy through his neglect. Opal thus begins to get to know Starling House, which seems to respond positively to her presence, in something of an inversion of how Shirley Jackson’s Hill House responds to visitors.

Because of her new access to the house, Opal’s life begins to change, initially for the better, as she begins making more money than she ever has before, allowing her to quit her part-time job as a cashier. Eventually, more ambiguous changes take hold, as her employment draws the attention of Elizabeth Baine, a consultant representing Gravely Power, the largest employer in the county.

As Opal learns more about Starling House and its mysterious inhabitant, she is drawn into a conflict between Arthur Starling and Gravely Power regarding mineral rights to the land where the house was built. As she becomes entangled in their dispute, Opal discovers that these two wealthy families have been clashing with each other for generations. She also learns that supernatural forces emerge from the mist that often surrounds Starling House, and that Arthur plays a pivotal role in curbing the impact of those forces.

While Harrow’s masterful intertwining of conventions from different genres provides a propulsive drive to the novel, even more impressive is the way she allows characters to grow across the narrative arc. She accomplishes this in part by shifting the story’s point of view. While Opal narrates the majority of the book, there are also scenes throughout the novel that pivot from her perspective to reveal more about Arthur. Additionally, Harrow employs occasional footnotes as another method for elaborating on the story while also building the world and its characters. The tone of the footnotes reveals that whoever is annotating Opal’s narrative is part of her world, someone who is knowledgeable about the local lore and history of Eden, Kentucky. One footnote, for instance, points out that few residents of Starling House “were born with the name Starling, but all of them were buried with it.”

Arthur Starling, who Opal describes once as “watching [her] Bond-villain-ly,” exhibits characteristics of the kind of Byronic hero we are accustomed to seeing wandering the moors at night or concealing a secret spouse in the attic; he is brooding and mysterious, with strange markings on his skin and a bent toward self-destruction. He is also described as ugly several times, which makes for a refreshing change from the darkly brooding but handsome men of other gothic-influenced stories. Yet as Opal learns more about Arthur’s past and his purpose for continuing to reside in Starling House, a place he clearly prefers not to be, she becomes more romantically interested in him, an interest that is slowly and begrudgingly returned as the narrative progresses. She learns that even as Arthur is grumpy and secretive, he is also generous, giving Opal a coat when he learns that she cannot afford one for herself and allowing her to drive his father’s truck.

While Opal and Arthur are the novel’s main characters, and their evolving connection with one another lives at the heart of the novel, Harrow does not neglect the other characters in her world. Opal’s teenage brother Jasper, for example, is established as Opal’s entire reason for everything she does. She dreams of getting Jasper out of Eden by sending him to the prestigious Stonewood Academy, a dream that she puts every spare dollar toward. However, Jasper develops as his own character throughout the book rather than serving only the narrative function of giving Opal something to strive for.

Even characters such as Bev, the cantankerous owner of the hotel where Opal and Jasper live, are given room to develop. She is first established as one of the many people in Opal’s life who seems to be there just to make things harder for the young woman, but she slowly becomes a more complex figure in Opal’s life. Bev is in fact the first person to tell Opal the origin story of Starling House, a history that is retold from new perspectives throughout the book as Opal learns more about the mysteries of the house and its resident family.

Alix E. Harrow’s novel is heavily rooted in the gothic tradition, focused as it is on a dark and mysterious house, but it also delves into fantasy as Opal learns that the property acts as a gateway to other worlds and that Arthur’s role as the heir of Starling House is much more multifaceted and dangerous than it initially seemed, back when she thought he was simply a wealthy recluse.

For readers who are drawn to a creative intertwining of different genres and rich characters, Harrow’s Starling House is well worth your time. The book also includes beautiful illustrations by Rovina Cai that deepen its mysteries just as Michael Whelan’s illustrations in The Gunslinger captivated this reader many years ago. Along with Harrow’s other work, including The Ten Thousand Doors of January (2019) and The Once and Future Witches (2020), Starling House demonstrates that Alix E. Harrow is an author to follow for anyone who finds pleasure in surprising reconfigurations of familiar genre conventions into something entirely new and alluring.