Hester Musson: The Night Hag book review – Night terrors unleashed
Musson has created a page-turner in this historical mystery of demonic proportions
We meet the titular subject of Hestor Musson’s second novel, pitched as a historical mystery, in the opening pages. It sets the tone (more thriller than mystery) from the off. It’s the dead-body hook of the crime genre, only in this case it is a terrifying night-mare (the hyphen indicating the mythological hag of sleep paralysis) that pins protagonist Lil to her bed until she is ‘on the very edge of sanity’.
No wonder Lil has nightmares. She is the daughter of a famous late 19th-century London medium, a mother who has her channelling spirits, ‘entertaining’ gentlemen and oozing ectoplasm from her early teens. Now 28, and an archaeologist working with mentors Nils and Effie, Lil remains tormented. She is spirit-sceptic, writing desperate, breathless letters to mysterious psychiatrist Lachlan, seeking a cure, or a rational explanation, for what we now call PTSD.
The bulk of the narrative unfolds in fictional Scottish hamlet Pitcarden, where Lil and Nils establish a dig, ostensibly looking for bronze age artefacts. Lil’s nightmares intensify. Meanwhile, and not incidentally, Effie is dying in Edinburgh. Things grow ever more gothic: barren landscapes, portentous weather, superstitious locals who gurn and fear the return of the ‘Pitcarden curse’ and its murderous hag (the dichotomy of hag as demon or goddess is both theme and metaphor throughout).
This Scotland-based author’s story gallops along, as quick and fevered as Lil’s thoughts. Terrible secrets are unearthed, along with cursed treasure. We are guessing to the end whether supernatural forces are at play. The prose is dense, and at times overwritten, yet the puzzle-box plot and constant misdirection expertly mirror Lil’s mental state. She resolves into a redoubtable hero, valiantly fighting the hysterical Victorian archetype that confined ‘difficult’ women. Propulsive and immersive, this is a cracking read and a confident step up from Musson’s epistolary debut, The Beholders.
The Night Hag is published is published by 4th Estate on Thursday 26 February.