The Haunted Stacks

review by Bec

This stor(e)y is set in a tower block in London, which is bisected into a half for luxury apartments for the rich, and a half for ‘affordable housing’ which is comparatively extremely poorly appointed and maintained. The entrance for the luxury half is up front, with a 24 hour concierge, where the entrance for the affordable half is hidden around back – there doesn’t seem to be any connection between the two halves on the interior of the building and the residents basically never interact with anyone from the other side.

Each chapter follows a different resident of (or visitor to) this tower block, detailing how the building is haunting them, and at the end of each chapter the hauntee receives an invitation to dinner party with the guy who owns the building, and lives in the penthouse suite.

This novel contains some genuinely scary imagery, squishy scenes, and tense moments; the descriptions of place have a great texture but I never found myself skipping over paragraphs to try and get to the point. Each of the chapters is its own self-contained story, making it kind of like a horror anthology except without 50% of the short stories being chaff. A lot of the characters are genuinely likable (Janek the long suffering plumber is my favourite) and most of them feel very well rounded with their own interests and expertise. There’s a bunch of anti-rich rhetoric threaded through the story, which is excellent and correct, and it was great to have a trans character whose gender was never called into question or made to be their most remarked upon trait.

Here’s a flavour of the writing style from Janek’s chapter:

Janek still allowed himself a small moment of snobbery, looking at the unnecessary and overpriced features some lucky fitter had managed to sell to Mr Fowler. Janek shook his head, imagining how much the man must have paid for it. He considered himself a good man, and always did his best to avoid passing judgement on others, but deep down he had an unshakeable conviction that all rich people were deeply stupid. Well, maybe not stupid exactly, but foolish, certainly. He’d seen it over and over again: there was simply no way to have that much money without it warping your relationship to the world in ways that made you laughably ignorant.

Page 270

I read this novel in two sittings and still managed to forget who some of the earlier characters were by the time we met them again at the dinner party, but despite that I found the ending cathartic, memorable, and gross. There’s some decent gore throughout this story but overall I’d put it more on the ‘unsettling’ end of the spectrum rather than ‘scary’, so it’d be a winner for someone who wants to be spooked but doesn’t need any nightmares.

Overall I really enjoyed this one and will definitely be picking up another Jonathan Sims novel. 4/5.