The Haunting of Falcon House

Eugene Yelchin's The Haunting of Falcon House is a cold, creeping ghost story for 10 year olds, told by a boy who is quite sure he is about to become a hero.

What happens

Prince Lev Lvov is twelve. Every Lvov before him fought in a war and served an emperor, and now an invitation has arrived from the family house in Saint Petersburg. So Lev leaves his mother, who taught him to draw from the heart, and takes the train north alone.

Late in the journey the window goes black and Lev sees a face in it. Not his. Another boy's, pale and waxy, eyes wide and pleading.

He blinks and it's gone.

Then the coachman meets him and stares. He says Lev is the image of his dead grandfather, and he'd know, because he drove the coffin to the burial himself.

Falcon House is worse. It runs the length of a street, with no light in any window and two stone falcons by a door whose knocker has frozen solid. Inside, the furniture wears dust sheets and the mirrors have gone so black they barely reflect anything at all.

His aunt receives him in a wheelchair, holds out a jewelled hand to be kissed, and tells him she must always be told the truth.

Then she starts teaching him the rules.

This is the good, slow, old-fashioned sort of frightening. Nothing jumps out. Things are simply wrong, and Lev keeps explaining them away because a hero wouldn't be bothered by any of it. Watching a narrator miss what you can see is the whole pleasure, and it's a brilliant thing for a child to catch on their own.

It does ask a lot of a reader, mind. Long sentences, nineteenth-century Russia, footnotes (yes, actual footnotes). Plenty of readers will want it read with them, and will love it that way.

Then there's the tone. How spooky do you want it? Because this isn't jolly-spooky. There's a boy who has died, a grandfather killed by one of his own inventions, and an aunt instructing Lev that servants are all thieves and robbers.

What to read next

If a big house with a secret suits them, Frost Hollow Hall opens with a newspaper report of a young heir drowning under the ice, and a village girl ten years later taking a dare to go up to the gates.