The maid finds the house unbearably depressed and not right. She, we learn, has faked an illness to try and get sent home. What is unusual is what Faraday hears on his return to Hundreds Hall to tend to the maid. The story isn’t all that uncommon after World War II when many of the gentry and aristocratic classes could no longer raise the funds to maintain their ancestral piles. By 1948, roughly when the novel is set, there is no money for repairs and barely any for the two servants left to tend the Ayres family. Faraday has childhood memories of what life was like at Hundreds Hall when it was in its heyday, so it’s a shock to him how far the mighty have fallen. Faraday, provides an outsider’s perspective to life in the no-longer-stately home, Hundreds Hall in Warwickshire. This is certainly the case in Sarah Water’s unsettling novel, The Little Stranger. Their outward features tend to keep people away. The comfort has vanished and they are almost universally cold. There might be family memories, but they are usually tainted somehow. A haunted house is uncanny because nothing is quite right. Homes should be warm, comfortable, full of memories of family life, and welcoming. In fact, the German word for uncanny is unheimlich, which can be literally translated as un-home-like. Haunted houses always seemed particularly creepy to me because of the way they invert the way home ought to feel.
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