THE LITTLE PEOPLE

This shocker will linger in memory like the echo of a scream. Bridget Chauncey unexpectedly inherits a small castle (actually it's a "biggish house") on the bog of Killabeg in Ireland. Over the protests of her fiance Daniel, she decides to turn it into a summer tourist hotel. In the meantime she discovers that her mysterious relative had an unusual hobby—he kept a village of complete dolls' houses in a locked tower. Later she and the guests—a masochistic American couple and their strange daughter, a self-effacing German and his Jewish wife, a drunken young Irishman and Daniel, discover the reason. And they enter into a contemporary Gothic nightmare, a hangover from WWII when an experiment in cytogenesis has produced perversion, terror and a strange power. Ultimately they are faced with the kind of self-knowledge that can lead to madness. It's Christopher at his best.