A thriller set in the Outer Hebrides incorporating myths, sea faring legends and the supernatural . Maggie, a disturbed young women goes to the islands to seek the truth but meets both love and problems on her journey of discovery

📚R E V I E W 📚

The Black House by Carole Johnstone

What a deliciously dark and atmospheric book!

This story was so much more than I was expecting. I thought it would be your run of the mill thriller, but instead it brought in reincarnation and seafaring myths.

Maggie has returned to the remote village of Kilmery in the Outer Hebrides because it has haunted her all her life. With her mother now dead, she needs to put the ghosts finally to rest.

The creepiness level shoots up as she settles into the Black House on the first night and it stays with you throughout the book.

The story is told from two viewpoints - Maggie who is trying to piece together the events that brought her to the island and Robert, a previous tenant of the Black House. The characters of the village are untrusting of Maggie and it’s only through her involvement with Will, that they slowly allow her in.

In this book, nothing is as it seems and secrets will always find a way of escaping. Maggie’s life is in danger and she doesn’t know who to trust.

The scene setting is outstanding and you can feel the cold biting at your toes. I loved reading about the archeological dig and all the ancient burial descriptions.

The end was fantastic, revealing the answers to all the secrets of the village as well as some I wasn’t expecting.

A truly chilling modern gothic thriller.

Thanks to @netgalley & @harpercollinsuk @harperfictionpr for the ARC copy.

Well... this book took me all round the houses and back again. I really had no idea where it was going half the time and, more importantly, where we would end up! All in a good way, I hasten to add.
We follow Maggie Mackay as she revisits her past. As a child she was convinced there'd been a murder on a remote island in the Outer Hebrides. She visited there, along with her mother and, well, long story short kicked up a storm and created quite a kerfuffle.
Her mother now dead and Maggie needs to know the truth. So she goes back. To a mixed reception. But she is determined to find out that truth. At whatever cost...
I really enjoyed Mirrorland when I read it a while back so I was quite excited to read this book. And a little nervous as my expectation was quite high. I needn't have worried though as she really did smash it out of the park for me with this book. I took to Maggie straight from the off. Her sadness and vulnerability really did tug at my emotions.
The main thing I really loved with this book was the setting - the remote island of Kilmery - which could almost stand for being a character in its own right, so integral it was to the story being told. It was so beautifully described. Warts and all, atmospheric in both a positive and negative way. So picturesque and also so dangerous. Stunning.
And the story was everything I wanted and more. Spoilers prevent me from expanding on this but it had all the elements you need for a great psychological thriller. Secrets, Lies, duplicity, as well as a smattering of romance!
There are a lot of characters but nothing my making a list couldn't handle. But they were all well drawn and played their parts well indeed.
All in all, a cracking read that I have no hesitation in recommending. My thanks go to the Publisher and Netgalley for the chance to read this book.

Maggie is trying to discover what happened to her as a child on a remote Scottish island. When she returns to Kilmey she meets a community which is both insular and suspicious. As she begins to ask questions about the past she is met with silence and threats. A series of unsettling events leave her scared and unsure who she can trust.

This is such an atmospheric and original, novel which beautifully intertwines mystery, superstition and mythology. The plot is extremely clever and combined with excellent writing creates a mesmerising read. The background of the wildly unpredictable weather creates the perfect theatre for the gothic and ghostly events. The characterisation is skilful and really brings the plot alive. I didn't want to put this book down.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Harper Collins for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This is a beautifully crafted tale, set on the island of Lewis. The descriptive passages are stunning and I was totally immersed in the writing. The main character, Maggie, is bipolar, she returns to the island in an attempt to discover what happened to her as a child in this dark and suspenseful thriller. I really enjoyed the read, the characterisation and the web of secrecy. I would recommend this if you enjoy psychological thrillers. Thanks to Net Galley for my ARC.

I like authors who think outside the box, and this one certainly does. I wish I had liked the main character more though. I also wish the pace had been faster, but not a bad read.

"The Blackhouse" had some really promising plot lines to it. However, it didn't quite come to fruition. Can't quite put my finger on it but it didn't all gel together for me. Plus the ending was a bit too creepy!

The Blackhouse is a great atmospheric thriller set in Ireland that blends crime & the mysterious perfectly, the novel jumps between the past & present and the story of Maggie who hopes to lay her past to rest by trying to find the truth behind a man - Andrew McNeil who when she was a child she believed he was murdered & she is his reincarnated soul.

Maggie returns to Kilmeray in search of the truth. The truth about her own past, her relationship with mum, and what really happened to Andrew McNeil. But, the truth comes at a price.

There are a lot of similarities between The Blackhouse and Carole Johnstone’s previous novel Mirrorland. Both centre on unreliable narrators trying to figure out the truth from their childhood memories.

The layering of lies upon lies takes a lot of time to unpick. Despite Maggie remembering her mother’s advice that she should ‘trust no one’, she is largely a trusting person. As a reader that often left me more confused about who should be trusted and what the eventual truth was.

I enjoyed the slightly supernatural element to the plot with Maggie’s relationship with the people of the remote Scottish island of Kilmeray coloured by her claims as a five-year-old to be the reincarnation of a man who died on the island. Or murdered as little Maggie claims. Back then Maggie and her mother told that no one by the name of the person Maggie claimed to have been had ever lived on the island. Returning as an adult, grieving for her mother and recovering from a bought on mental ill health, Maggie wants to try to understand what was really going on.

It’s a good but complex story. I found myself losing interest at times as I lost track of what was true and who was who. Fans of Catriona Ward will enjoy this one I think.

I enjoy reading books set in places I have visited and so I came to pick this one. However, although I enjoy a good crime novel, I am not keen on reading about the supernatural and this book had too much of the latter genre for my liking. I afraid that I didn't finish it and therefore will leave an average rating although I acknowledge that others may really enjoy this dark tale.

I loved this dark thriller from Carol Johnstone, with its bleak setting, mysterious deaths and Norse folklore. Maggie Mackay is a successful investigative journalist, but has always been held back by a negative inner voice and terrible nightmares. She’s been haunted by the idea that there’s something wrong with her and she can see or sense darkness. She thinks this feeling is linked to her childhood and a small village in the Outer Hebrides called Blairmore. Maggie stayed there with her mother when she was very young and caused a furore when, out of nowhere, she claimed that someone in the village had murdered a man. She left the community in uproar, saying she was really a man called Andrew MacNeil who had lived on the island of Kilmery. Her mother believed and encouraged her claims, but when they returned to the mainland this strange interlude wasn’t referred to again. Now 25, Maggie returns to the island, in search of answers. Mainly, she wants to find out if her claims could possibly have been true, but with her history on the island, Maggie may struggle to get people to talk to her. However, this is an island with few inhabitants, but a wealth of secrets and if Maggie gets too close to the truth she may be in serious danger.

Kilmery is sat across a causeway from Lewis and Harris, and the author makes this incredible place a real character of it’s own. It’s isolated position reinforces the feeling of loneliness that surrounds Maggie. She roams around the island, often alone and there were times she felt like an easy target, especially to someone who knows the terrain better than she does. Shipwrecks litter the coast and the author’s description of a ship coming to harm one stormy night enhances that feeling of danger.

‘It wasn’t the screams he remembered the most, although they crashed to shore inside the howling, furious wind and ricocheted around the high cliffs above the beach for hours. It wasn’t the storm or the roaring, foaming waves that carved great snaking wounds through the wet sand and stole its shape from under his feet.’

For Maggie, the island is changeable and I felt the way it was viewed echoed the journey she’s on through this dark, dangerous investigation to the hint of a possible brighter future. The wind, fog, and storms lashing against the rocks are unnerving, but there are places that Maggie finds peace. At the Oir na Tir standing stones, even with the wind and rain driving against them, Maggie senses their permanence. This is something that won’t be moved and stands like a sentinel, weathering every storm that’s passed over them. This is the kind of permanence Maggie wants in her own mind, a sense of peace that stays despite what life throws at her. Then there’s the meadow, shown to her by Will, one of the locals she befriends.

‘At the bottom of the hill is a vast green meadow stretching as far as the eye can see. It’s gorgeous, dotted with silver-still lochans, gold winter heather, and boulders covered in moss and orange lichen. It opens something inside my chest, precarious and fragile; a sense of longing that I suppose is awe or wonder. At this uncannily beautiful place full of a light and colour so at odds with the bronze desolation of those inland bens and glens […] I can feel the sting of ludicrous tears, and blink them away.’

This is machair, a type of dune grassland formed by sand and broken shells blown over from the beach. In opens up a sense of wonder in Maggie, like the childhood awe we have for Christmas and it’s magic. It’s almost as if this piece of the landscape connects her to the child she was before all of this happened. Can she trust it though?

I loved the link to the supernatural and Norse folklore, particularly the idea of ‘thin places’, something I’ve had a feeling about before. As an avid reader of the Outlander series, this ability to move into a different time or experience a haunting feels synonymous with Scotland. Old fisherman Charlie, who decides to talk to Maggie about the past, describes a thin place as where the space between this and other worlds is the shortest. The chance of seeing, knowing or feeling something from another world is high. There’s superstition within the fishermen, who never say a prayer aboard a boat, but douse it in whiskey and salt or even use burning rags to cleanse every corner of the boat, rather like smudging using sage twigs. It’s the ‘Vándr-varði’ that feel really disturbing, left anonymously outside The Blackhouse, where Maggie is staying. They’re mummified crows, old Norse talismans to guard against evil, but Maggie doesn’t know whether they’ve been left to protect her or whether she’s the evil that needs to be kept at bay. All of this superstition adds to the mystery Maggie is trying to solve, but she wonders whether it’s meant to spook her and warn her off the truth. The tension keeps building and by the time Maggie has a midnight visitor, my heart was racing.

The central mystery is fascinating and makes the book very difficult to put down. Charlie feels like the designated spokesperson for the islanders, he approaches Maggie with an apology for the way they treated her when she was a child and there’s a fatherly feel to the way he talks to her. On one hand I felt he was on Maggie’s side, but I also wondered whether he was a decoy - someone sent to give her just enough information, perhaps to deflect her from the reaching the truth. Other people greet her with outright hostility and I had a lot of admiration for Maggie’s tenacity considering how vulnerable she must feel, staying on the island as a lone woman. Maggie also has a bipolar diagnosis and I thought this was well portrayed by the author, even though it adds another layer of uncertainty - can we trust what Maggie is experiencing? I found Maggie’s narration more compelling than the male narrator, but overall loved the pace and the different perspectives that give us an insight into events back in the 1970’s. There were twists I didn’t expect and the final revelations about the mystery felt satisfying. I love how this author likes to wrong-foot her reader and although this was more gothic than horror, there were parts that were very unsettling and left me listening out for creaks in the dead of night. I came away from it with an uneasy feeling, not about the supernatural aspects, but more about what humans are capable of doing and how isolated communities like this one have the perfect environment in which to plot and keep secrets, in some cases for decades. This cements Carol Johnstone in my mind as an author to look out for and i’ll be buying a finished copy for my collection.

This story weaves between the supernatural and present reality, and at different times, one is more dominant than the other. Maggie doesn't know who to believe, and even doubts her own recollections and reasons for past actions. She comes back to the isolated Scottish Island where it all started, and stirs up some deep resentment among the local community. She also makes some friends, or has she? Her quest for the truth is at the heart of this book, but it puts her and others in danger. There will be winners and losers, and Maggie eventually holds the key to who they will be.

A dark tale full of atmospheric descriptions of the storm battered island, the description are beautifully describe and draw you in aswel as repel you out. The sea itself is like a character playing a big role in the book, with its gothic undertones this books cover and looks at many issues, I maybe felt it was abit drawn out in the middle and maybe too long but it did all add to the background and keep you invested in the story.

Johnstone nails the atmosphere, on a tiny self sufficient island when the sea is raging and the night is too black to see a cliff edge right infront of you, or indeed a person sneaking up behind. However each time the tension started to build the reader is heavily reminded of the unreliable narrator and we once again delve deep into the day to day goings on of island life the next morning which destroyed the pacing for me.

I found the first third of the book very slow going, there were enough moments woven in alongside my experience of Johnstone's previous novel Mirrorland (which I also struggled with until a major turning point left me adoring the book) to force me to keep turning pages, but a less patient person may have given up sooner.

There is a hefty dose of Gaelic language in The Blackhouse, a big positive for the setting but a frequent stammer in the pacing for me as I attempted to navigate the story. My inner reading voice struggled with the pronunciations and occasionally the context wasn't enough for me to grasp the words meaning. I wish I'd known (or thought to check!) that there was a glossary in back.

The essential mystery, is whether our main character really is the reincarnation of a dead man- as she has believed since childhood- and whether this man was murdered.

Kilmeray is a tight knit village with the typical wariness of outsiders, I really enjoyed how Johnstone built relationships between Maggie and each resident and was quite enamoured of them all by the end.

I'm pleased I stuck with The Blackhouse, more character driven than plot, the story unfolds slowly from the present perspective of Maggie and the past of Robert and Andrew. Although I rate Johnstone's debut Mirrorland much higher, there were still some jaw droppers in store here and the complex characters eventually melted my heart.

The Blackhouse | Carole Johnstone
Genre: Mystery, Thriller
The Blackhouse is a standalone mystery novel by author, Carole Johnstone. I have previously read Carole Johnstone’s debut Mirrorland. On the strength of Mirrorland, I eager grabbed up this book when it became available.
The Blackhouse follows Maggie Mackay, who when she was 5 years old announced that she was a man called Andrew MacNeil and that someone had murdered him. This intriguing premise drew me into the book immediately. The atmospheric setting in the remote island community of Blairmore makes this book something different. The author delivers a dark layered mystery which touches on mental health, supernatural, parenting, murder and much more.

The only thing I struggle with was the pacing. The book started out so strong, I was hooked immediately, the story that the author set up was tense, foreboding and I just had to know more. The middle section of the book dragged for me a bit and I was tempted at times to DNF. I’m glad I didn’t and felt the set up and strength of the books start allowed me to hold in there and get to the end. I enjoyed the way the author wrapped things up and I wasn’t disappointed.

The book is told with dual POV between Maggie and a male character. I enjoyed the Maggie chapters a lot more than the other ones. Maggie was an interesting protagonist and I felt the author portrayed her mental health and grief in a realistic way.

Overall this was a dark, complex mystery with interesting characters and set in a unique location. While I didn’t enjoy this one as much as Mirrorland, I will definitely continue to read more by this author going forward.
Thank you to Carole Johnstone, the publisher and Netgalley for an ARC.

I really enjoyed Mirrorland with its creepy wild imaginings so was eager to read this.

Set on a remote island in the Outer Hebrides, Maggie Mackay is an outsider compelled to spend time there to try to uncover her truth.

I've never read a book which captures the storm battered island life so well. Bleakly beautiful, battered by waves and storms, lives ruled and ruined by the waves, whisky and traditions.

It's an unusual psychological mystery, Maggie is bipolar, superbly characterised, and is both attracted and repelled by the island. The mysteries and secrets run deep, spanning generations.

Not the fastest book, but deeply atmospheric and I really, really enjoyed it. Once again Carole Johnson has delivered a very distinctive, dark and disquieting novel.

Thanks to Netgalley and HarperCollins UK

I loved this, its very creepy and is told in such a way that I really felt like I was there. Maggie is a great character, very different to the typical character in a thriller. Is she crazy though? I'd highly recommend this.

THE BLACKHOUSE by Carole Johnstone
DEBUT NOVEL - 3 STARS
Published Date: 4 August 2022

I was excited to receive an ARC of this DEBUT novel. The summary was intriguing, location descriptions were atmospheric. After a slow start, things pick up but didn't keep my interest. I enjoyed the writing style and the Scottish dialogue between characters was witty and sharp. The protagonist, Maggie, I did not like. As for other characters, Kelly Campbell was my favourite, sharp-tongued and fun, she made me smile! As for the storyline I was confused, I may need to re-read.

I WANT TO THANK NETGALLEY FOR THE OPPORTUNITY OF READING AN ADVANCED COPY OF THIS BOOK FOR AN HONEST REPLY

This is an atmospheric book that draws you into the depths of the Scottish island. The isolation and clannishness seeps out of the book and it's no surprise that the village is awash with secrets. I sometimes found Maggie quite irritating and the romanctic element was unbelievable and perhaps superfluous but It's an unusual and surprising theme and that's what kept me reading it . I really wanted to know the answers to the many questions. No spoilers - but it's a good read.

Another one I could not put down and devoured in one sitting. I absolutely recommend this book. Be ready for an afternoon or evening of completely neglecting any chores as this one will have you hooked within the first chapter.