Some readers may know me by another name – Abbie Frost. The Guest House is my first novel under this pseudonym. It has a distinctly gothic tone and is set on the wild west coast of Ireland. My ancestors on all sides left Ireland for England and Scotland during the terrible days of the potato famine at the end of the 19th century. So I have always been fascinated by those times.
My writing heroine is Daphne Du Maurier and like the Manderley of her classic novel, Rebecca, the house in The Guest House becomes as important to the book as the human characters.
The guest house of the title is one of the grand homes built by the Anglo-Irish landowners, some of whom ignored or even contributed to the suffering of the poverty stricken Irish peasants who lived on their estates. Although my main character, Hannah, is very much a modern woman, with no apparent links to the country or the house, she finds that the past, her own and that of the old house itself make what should have been a relaxing holiday into an increasingly terrifying, and dangerous experience.
Sublime Horror calls The Guest House ‘Thrilling… Abbie Frost does a particularly fantastic job creating the auditory aspects of her fictional world, not only through her various descriptions of the sounds outside the titular guest house, but also creaky floor-boards, scraping dinner plates, and most frightening of all, spectral sounds of crying children. The Guest House joins multiple traditions within horror fiction, containing such familiar features as the haunted house and a mysterious serial killer.
Frost’s knowledge of and love for the genre is blindingly clear through her refreshing cast of characters, digital horror, and deployment of the gothic. Because of the murder mystery at its core, The Guest House also provides its readers with the delightful experience of playing detective.’
Chris Curran, Author 