THE WHITE EARTH

A stretch of Australian land and the ancient manse that sits upon it prove troublesome for generations of a haunted family.

The earth itself is a central character in this gothic novel from rising Aussie star McGahan (1988, 1997, etc.). In the lush Darling Downs part of Queensland, 500 square miles of prime farm and ranchland was once owned by the magisterial White family, which frittered it away in a series of unfortunate accidents and bad decisions recounted in periodic flashback chapters. All that remains of the grand White legacy is Kuran House, a massive, falling-down folly of a grand edifice now inhabited by one witchlike housekeeper and her charge, a doddering old man named John McIvor. His tangled and bitter relationship with the Whites emerges over several hundred precisely paced pages. New to Kuran House are McIvor’s unnamed sister, whose husband has just died in a fire, and her son, William. William serves as the entry point to a bloody and haunted backstory, as he wanders the house’s decrepit corridors, explores the ghostly lands and gets swept up in McIvor’s quixotic dream to beat a piece of legislation that could give all the land back to the Aborigines. Buried secrets wait to be discovered, and many past sins still need to be atoned for. Sickly, delusional William begins to see things and people that may or may not be there. McGahan knows how to lay out a spooky story with palpable characters and dramatic shifts of tone. He also makes good use of his substantive research in a fictional work that serves as a primer on how Aborigines were cleared from the land like so many pests.

Chilling fiction that serves to illuminate even darker facts—Pat Barker fans, take special note.