A museum curator follows part of the collection brought outside of London due to the war, but then dead things begin to stir.

The high concept of the book is good, a nice twist on the stranger in a strange land that ought to be familiar. And in general, the treatment of the tropes of gothic fiction is good, verging on clever. It is a response to every madwoman in the attic. And the mystery has a satisfying, somewhat ambiguous, solve to it that I like. And it's been a while since I felt like I was rooting for a character as much as here.

Unfortunately, the text is something of a mess. The first person narration hurts by providing far too much telling as opposed to showing. In particular the romance plot has all its energy drained by that, and its somewhat...porny method of description (take a drink every time the heat of touch comes up) that telegraphs everything. That the first person narration switches characters seems like one of those 101 mistakes, and at least in my edition the choice to make some whole chapters italicized makes them functionally unreadable. Which is a shame because that was the more interesting POV. The writing is dry. The historicity is not quite there, and it feels like a lot more could or should have been made of it, and instead is just a sort of casual way to stand out a little from similar texts.

So solid ideas, but the execution is a drag.