Annette and Duncan, recently widowed/semi-orphaned by WW2 escape their London home to go and live in their inheritance, a large house in a village in Scotland. Annette has plans to turn it into a lodging house, and begins to revive it from its years of dusty sleep, just in time for their first lodger.
Unfortunately for them, their first guest is The Clockmaker, a recent escapee of a Nazi POW camp, in which he was interred due to his inability to die and interesting experiments building artificial creatures. It's a shame he mostly builds these out of fragments of the corpses he also makes, given that they tend to be very clever little devices.
There are various hints that these are more than mere clockwork monsters, with a few supernatural horror elements thrown into the book, though these are never explored enough to add significant terror, and their motivations are never very convincing.
The other villagers are fodder for the Clockmaker's bigger monsters, which is unfortunate, as they don't really like him. The post-war atmosphere, aggressive as it is to people from the continent, is portrayed wonderfully, with some subtle yet effective moments of rejection. Also done well are Annette's interactions with harassing, mysognynistic villains, who see a widow and want to take advantage. They have some properly creepy moments, and are very well drawn characters. The little insights to their psychology are nicely horrifying.
Which is why I find it odd that the bigger threat in the book, The Clockmaker and his collection of vicious killing machines gets very short shrift. Their appearances are brief, and tend to tell more than show, with the action scenes not giving a real sense of fear. I'm also not entirely sure why he was doing it. The Clockmaker's interactions with Annette and more particularly Duncan, acting as a friendly uncle figure are sweet but tense, with his motivations always questionable and these glimpses of his inner cruelty are much more potent.
One oddity, in that Annette and her dead husband's first meeting seems to be told twice, in two different ways, which makes me suspect the book should have had a little more editing. I'm lead to believe this will be the beginning of a series, but I won't be following it. It does very well in the quiet fear, but doesn't really deliver on the overall threat.
Tagged: Book Horror Horrible humans Nobel Print Netgalley