Dr. Montague intends to investigate paranormal phenomena and prove they're real, and of the several people he invites to stay at Hill House for the summer, Theodora and Eleanor are the only ones to reply. Luke, the heir of the house, joins them because his presence is required by the owners.

They quickly discover that the house has a life of its own. It's almost a living breathing entity whose sole purpose is to confuse and consume them while making them feel isolated. When night descends, there are voices, sounds, shadows, and figures, but the way the house attaches itself to the psyche and spirit of one of the characters in particular is even more horrifying. The more their mind is splintered, the stronger the house becomes and the two become intertwined.

Although The Haunting of Hill House is in many ways a traditional haunted house story, it's Jackson's prose, her ability to bend the horror genre into subtle psychological terror, and the ambiguousness that make it special. The film adaptation The Haunting (1963) and the loose 2018 Netflix adaptation do it justice. Both are atmospheric, visually gorgeous, and are able to turn your blood into ice.

A cozy lunch chat among friends. A couple of references to the future (changes to both London and Nightingale), but the reference to Molly alone was worth reading this vignette. She needs her own novella, it made me curious about her past.

How gorgeous is this! Molly's voice is exactly what I had pictured and hoped. Now I definitely need a novella about her.

I'd like to have more of these small cases that Peter has to deal with between the big ones. This one is a nice little ghost story. A predictable and kind of non-compelling one, but still nice.

PS. The list I'm referencing puts this before Moon Over Soho, but this is actually set between MOS and Whispers Under Ground.

More cohesive plot-wise than the first one, and the dry humor is still great, the characters still feel like actual real people, and the portrayal of London and its history is still spot on (occasionally verging on info dumping, but I can deal with that since it's not excessive). If the purpose is to have only one main case from now on, I think it will work better in terms of keeping track of the personal lives of the characters and how the magical world is progressing.

Although jazz isn't really for me and I know nothing about it, I actually preferred the case revolving around it (and the nightlife in Soho) more than the river gods in the first book, and I absolutely loved the secondary plot in its Dr. Moreau-esqueness. I can hear the faint murmur of an excellent villain in the distance.

Someone definitely needs to reign Peter in soon, though, before he completely mucks something up because of his inexperience and tendency to get distracted.

Considering I have zero interest in sports, I wasn't particularly excited about this, but thankfully it's not sports-heavy and instead deals with magical trouble. Another reference to Ettersburg as well.

The first story that is set after the events of Rivers of London, and it's a look into how magic is dealt with in Germany. I'm curious to see if this will play out somehow in future books. Hopefully so, because this feels like an introduction to something and raises more questions than anything. Clearly taking an apprentice is a breach of some kind of arrangement that we learned in the first book, but what happens now?

The Deplorables continue the parade of small glimpses of great side characters, but the protagonist and his friends and whatever they had going on kind of left me cold. The basement part was great, though, and I couldn't really tell where the story was going.

The story is nothing exciting (even bland in some respects), but doing it in comic form at least brings a nice variety to the series detours. Too bad the art is hit-and-miss. Some panels are fine, some have bland backgrounds, and some have characters that are indistinguishable from each other or have strange indistinguishable expressions. Hopefully, it just means a drop in quality and isn't a continuous thing with the comics.

 Despite the page number, this is all about great themes: love, hate, ignorance, death, birth. During two summer days and nights a group of people is introduced, whose stories form separate atmospheric scenes. Yrjö 'Nokia' Salonen struggles with his inner turmoil and lovelessness, young couple Helka and Arvid enjoy their time together, Santra needs tenderness while her husband Jukka wanders around drunk, Hilja and Jalmari are expecting their third child, a lonely artist ponders his role as a father and the old matriarch of Teliranta remembers her girlhood through her grandchild Helka.

The mood is lingering, like the gentle breeze of wind on a sizzling hot summer day, and the tenderness of a Finnish summer night can only be understood by those who have experienced it. Some moments are so beautiful they almost make you cry.

My favourite character of all these is absolutely Nokia, a blonde haired pretty boy who tries out the life of a... Well, I don't know how to translate this. You know, a man who balanced on the logs and guided them along the river. Anyway, Nokia makes a mistake, and in the end the anxiety and (sexual) frustration lead into a very touching scene.

One thing that goes through the whole book is an erotic charge, that apparently appalled the people of 1930s Finland (Sillanpää was a bit of a rebel I think). Maybe now this doesn't evoke the same kind of reaction in a reader, but the subtle hints by the right choices of words are for me the thing that makes this novel an even greater emotional experience.

Oh, and I'd really like to see the 1948 Valentin Vaala film. I usually (with one or two exceptions) hate old Finnish movies with their wooden actors, child-like actresses, and unintentionally amusing vibe. This, however, might be another exception. Just because of the beautiful Martti Katajisto, and because I hear the mood has been realised really well.