The Little Stranger--Sarah Waters

I don't like to draw out the time it takes to read a creepy book, so it may be helpful to know that I read The Little Stranger in about a day and a half. (This "compression" method may make such atmospheric books even more overwhelmingly creepy, but for less long, so I keep doing it.)
Waters is known for non-creepy novels about English lesbians in various historical settings.** The Little Stranger is a departure from her previous work in that it is quite plainly creepy, and it contains no obvious lesbians. But fans will certainly recognize her other hallmarks: vivid evocation of place and psyche, and suspenseful storytelling. These elements combine in this book like milk and sugar in tea, to result in a delicious read. (Simile WIN.)

The creepiness in the story is subtle, though, and slips only slowly into the characters' pedestrian lives. We have a somewhat unreliable narrator, though we are not bludgeoned over the head with that fact: very light touches here and there give us insight into his subconscious motivations and feelings. His understanding of those people and situations around him is somewhat at odds with our own, increasingly so as the story progresses. But in addition to its creepiness and psychological veracity, the book has an even bigger thematic agenda: it also manages to explore class in post-war England, a time when the social order was changing.

The Little Stranger also happens to fit into a small post-war-England motif I have going at the moment. Elements of this motif are the book itself, and also my grandmother, who was in the RAF in the war, and with whom I am drinking thrice-daily tea while home. She has lent me another book on the subject, which is much more lighthearted but is rooted in the same truth: life after the war was just as depressing as life during the war. Food and supplies were still rationed, everything was poor and bombed out, and daughters and sons were dead forever, but now life was supposed to return to normal. Its plain inability to do so made some people feel hopeless. Waters also visited this time period in her last novel, The Night Watch. I found that book technically excellent in its Okazaki fragments, but also thoroughly depressing. This marriage of excellence and depressingness is often par for the Waters course. (If you want to put a silver lining on it, the frequency of this combination makes each book more suspenseful. As a reader you never know whether things are going to turn out okay, or--more often--not.)

**Lest this make her sound like a lightweight--she has twice been nominated for the Booker prize, and her first novel was named New York Times Book of the Year.