Sarah O'Connor

“It wasn’t hard to be brave. Not if it was for someone you love,” (McCauley 336).

After a tragedy that results in her mother’s death, Marin Blythe finds herself lost in the world until she receives a letter from her favourite horror author, Alice Lovelace and former friend of her mother, offering her a nanny position at Lovelace House. Marin jumps at the opportunity, watching the two strange children as Alice writes her next novel. Thea holds funerals for her dolls, and Wren pulls pranks that escalate in a way to scare Marin away. But when Alice’s eldest daughter Evie arrives things settle at Lovelace House, and Marin is drawn to Evie. But all is not well in Lovelace. Not when dead birds appear in Marin’s room or when the girl’s show her the chest full of braids made of human hair in the attic, certainly not when a mutilated animal is found in the woods. Secrets cloak themselves around Lovelace House, and Marin will discover what they are.

All the Dead Lie Down has been compared to The Haunting of Bly Manor and, FUN FACT, I cried for about half an hour to forty-five minutes at the finale. Cried really is too simple of a word, I was inconsolable, I scared myself. Beautiful show, I’ll never watch it again. So I was very nervous to start this book, but GOOD NEWS I didn’t cry, nor was I inconsolable in the end! But that doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy the book.

The parallels to The Haunting of Bly Manor are very fitting, the book starts very similar to that (and The Turn of the Screw, really) where a young nanny is employed to watch two creepy brats. Unlike The Reappearance of Rachel Price where I felt like the characters were speaking with fake American accents, this book felt like they were speaking with fake British ones. I half expected a few “perfectly splendid’s” and will admit to imagining the book was narrated by Carla Gugino with a bad Yorkshire accent. The Hallowell children call Alice their “mother” with a clumsy explanation at the end of how they could never call her anything else. I was partly assuming one of the twists would be that the Hallowell/Lovelace’s were all ghosts or at least stuck in the house from the past which is why they spoke so oddly (not the case, they’re just privileged and living in a Gothic novel).

While the book starts strongly with parallels to The Haunting of Bly Manor this makes a twists halfway through where the book stops being a Gothic novel and starts being a Fantasy. While I didn’t see this twist coming, I wasn’t a fan of it. I like my Gothic novels to stay Gothic novels, either supernatural creatures are implied to exist from the start or they aren’t. The choice to switch to Fantasy didn’t really fit with the story, while there is mention later of a few other characters possessing this same ability there never is a resolution or explanation for why it exists or where it comes from. At this point the novel starts to feel like the show (NOT the book) The Haunting of Hill House, even having one of the characters wear gloves a la Theo Crain.

The book is set in modern times despite seeming like the past with mentions of train trips and zoetropes and lots of Latin. There is one mention of a cellphone that Marin fails to charge once it dies and is conveniently not used for the remainder of the book (come on Marin, you’re Gen Z, why aren’t you on TikTok?). I get it’s a Gothic novel, but the genre can be adapted to modern times. While not a Gothic novel, Bad Cree did an excellent job modernizing a haunting by having the (SPOILER) wendigo speak to Mackenzie through text messages and mess with her phone. I love the old Victorian Gothic elements too, but either set the story in the past or find a way to modernize it to now. It is possible!

But it was a good book. I liked reading about Marin’s anxiety and how she learned to cope as well as the theme of grief throughout. It was well-written, and there were a lot of twists that I didn’t see coming. It’s a very well-written and well-plotted book, I do wish a little more was said about (SPOILER) Evie’s powers because the whole raising the dead thing was still a bit unclear in the end, particularly on how the dead things “come back wrong” though it’s revealed there’s a lot more of those who came back who seemed to have come back okay. And did Evie bring Marin back on the train accident?

All the Dead Lie Down is a well-written Gothic that will keep reader’s guessing, with a fantastic queer relationship to boot. Lovers of The Haunting of Bly Manor (who maybe handled the ending better than I did) will adore this!

Publication: May 16 2023
Publisher: Katherine Tegen Books
Pages: 368 pages (Hardcover)
Source: Library
Genre: Fiction, Horror, Gothic, Queer, Young Adult, Fantasy
My Rating: ⛤⛤⛤.5
Summary:

Days after a tragedy leaves Marin Blythe alone in the world, she receives a surprising invitation from Alice Lovelace—an acclaimed horror writer and childhood friend of Marin’s mother. Alice offers her a nanny position at Lovelace House, the family’s coastal Maine estate.
Marin accepts and soon finds herself minding Alice’s peculiar girls. Thea buries her dolls one by one, hosting a series of funerals, while Wren does everything in her power to drive Marin away. Then Alice’s eldest daughter returns home unexpectedly. Evie Hallowell is every bit as strange as her younger sisters, and yet Marin is quickly drawn in by Evie’s compelling behavior and ethereal grace.
But as Marin settles in, she can’t escape the anxiety that follows her like a shadow. Dead birds appear in Marin’s room. The children’s pranks escalate. Something dangerous lurks in the woods, leaving mutilated animals in its wake. All is not well at Lovelace House, and Marin must unravel its secrets before they consume her.