The Girl from Rawblood is a Gothic. Boy, is it ever. That stock bit of literary negging about a book transcending its genre is especially laughable here: Rawblood doesn’t elevate its Gothic trappings, it subsumes itself in them, holding its breath and diving to the bottom of a dark well.

Catriona Ward clearly finds a lush beauty down in those airless shadows, and that beauty–always intense and overheated, but sometimes stark and alien and sometimes mannered–is one of the real pleasures of the book for me. This is partly a family saga, with three generations of Villarcas and Gilmores and Danforths, et al, but while the timelines blur (literally, as it turns out), the voices don’t. The technical distinctions–first-person present tense, third-person omniscient, epistolary, etc.–are cleverly handled, but Ward adjusts much more than that. She’s exceptionally good at matching voice and style to character and scenario. Iris and Tom’s off-kilter sentence fragments (the peculiar, broken language of a shared dream); Charles Danforth’s florid, contemplative, self-deceiving diary entries; the Austenian omniscient POV and free indirect discourse we get in Mary and Hephzibah’s section … this is a book where I want to soak up the language.

He does everything at a great pace and prefers to be occupied with two tasks at once. I have seen him scratching an equation with one hand, while with the other, he feeds a kitten with a cloth soaked in milk. He is often impatient with others of his species but tenderhearted with dumb things. When it is required that they must be sacrificed in the course of his work, he does not demur, however; beneath his sentiment, he has the level temperament required by our profession.

On Wednesdays, the women visit. Sometimes, old men come and little boys, not many. The sisters, wives, mothers, cousins come with stockings drawn on their legs and bright lips. Then the men sit up, and everyone smokes and plays cards. They laugh. No one peels back the bedclothes to see what has been lost.

Miss Hopewell sold her cottage at Brighton and went to live with her one remaining cousin, a Mrs. Anstruther, who was married to a legal gentleman with a promising career at the Inns and had a young family, which showed a marked tendency to enlarge itself at every opportunity. Miss Hopewell asserted that she considered it her duty to contribute her monthly portion to the household, but this was considered parsimonious, the fault that Mrs. Anstruther deplored more than any other, and could not be permitted. … Cousin Mary must put all such thoughts from her head. No, she should enjoy what she could of London and be quite peaceful. But perhaps … if she wished to take the children for a drive now and again …

This is my secret: when I touch the skeleton, I become part of the dim air of the dining room, the shining mahogany, Martin’s tabby-cat hair, which hangs in a brilliantined strand over his warm forehead. I move through the granite walls of Rawblood like water.

There’s a real sense of difference here. Ward’s interest in her characters and her attention to their individual ways shows a wide appreciation of humanity, which I think goes hand-in-hand with the fact that Rawblood, despite following an aristocratic family, has a variety of thoughtfully portrayed characters who are either working class or poor. The Villarcas have a nasty history with the Gilmores–Meg’s instinctively crafted blood sacrifice even trades Robert Gilmore’s life away for her daughter’s birth–and we see that play out over generations. We see Lottie and Frank, a nurse and a cabbie’s son, build up their tentative romance and grapple with their own souls. And Ward understands that the struggle for survival often has a grinding effect on the people scraping along at the bottom of the barrel, and when they’re pushed towards callousness and cruelty–Hephzibah lying to Mary and blackmailing Reverend Comer, Lottie calling Iris “the biter”–there’s a narrative empathy for them.

And of course, this is, in a lot of ways, a book of outsiders: strangers in strange lands, abused and deprived children, queer men, wounded soldiers. (Hephzibah’s Roma ancestry is handled less gracefully; it’s the one traditionally Gothic trope that actually feels jarring here.) Iris, reduced to a wraith, her shaved head scarred from multiple lobotomies, her eyes haunted, is the human version of the rabbits that Alonso and Charles diligently torture with the purest of intentions, driving for scientific progress and cutting their test subjects’ vocal cords so they don’t have to listen to the screams.

Which brings us to the intersection of the occult and the official, or at least the ordinary. The supernatural elements of Rawblood are real, vivid, and eerie. Iris’s ghost, severed from time and wandering through the house, driven by loneliness and fury and homesickness and desperation, is a fantastic payoff for the mysterious “her” that has plagued the Villarcas for generations. We get great horror both before that revelation–Charles looking up at his room and seeing the white face at the window–and after–Iris driving Leopoldo into the bog and taunting him with her slow, horrific death. Iris’s escape is one of my favorite horror stories, a kind of classically strange Carnival of Souls journey. And I can’t forget the cave, which feels like authentic English folklore, especially with the nasty catch of what happens when Tom puts Iris’s ring there–that the ones you love may never die. (A friend of mine came up with a theory I completely buy: long ago, Shakes too put something in the cave, and he now has immortality without youth.)

But the supernatural horror also has a kind of numinous quality to it, especially at the end. The supernatural isn’t the true cause of the horror, it’s just how the horror makes itself felt. Ghosts and witchcraft have nothing on those repeatedly vivisected rabbits, or the wrench of realizing Charles deliberately forced Alonso into an opium addiction, or the nurse telling Julia that she’ll have to lie in her own piss and shit, or the holes in Iris’s head. For me, the most terrifying passage in the novel is the one where a heavily drugged Iris is reunited with her old tutor, Dr. Martin Goodman, and briefly thinks she’s about to be saved:

I whisper, so light it’s barely a breath on the air, “Martin, thank you. Home.”

Martin smiles into my eyes and says, “I’m Dr. Goodman. Do you remember me? It’s a pleasure. May I call you Iris? Yes.”

I try to say Martin, of course, I remember. Cranium, mandible…

He takes a tongue depressor from his breast pocket. My jaws are gently parted, and the depressor pokes like a dry stick. He watches. His eyes are kind.

“I was never permitted to be a guest at Rawblood,” he says. “But I am quite happy to have you stay in my house!” He smiles at his joke. “As long as you like!”

Iris is in the hands of a passive-aggressive man with an old grudge and an inflated sense of his own decency, a man who is only too pleased to have power over her. Once, he had to teach her; now, showing his appreciation for her intelligence only means leading her into consenting to her own lobotomy. (The first one, at least.)

The world, without even going out of its way, has enough human apathy and cruelty to turn a girl into a nightmare, a figure so saturated with suffering that most people can’t even bear to share a sliver of her experiences. It’s no surprise that the novel comes to a close around WWI, when the landscape feels haunted with all the damage people can do.

But Ward sees more than the worst, which makes the book brutal and gutting but not exactly cynical. The characters are capable of kindness and tenderness, too: Tom Gilmore digs the grave, Lottie pays for Iris to come home in death, Meg guides her brother to peace. And despite all the darkness, at the end of everything, our last image is of light. I’m sure there will be people who can’t believe in that tentative hope, not after everything we’ve seen. (After all, just few paragraphs before the end, it seems like Iris is in real danger of being swept up into hell.) But I think it’s the right note for the novel to end on–at once familiar and estranging, comforting and uncertain. The world was the root of the horror, and Iris is away from it now. The air is clearer.