Sarah Waters is a literary novelist who wrote one of the best ghost stories of the century, and the rest of her catalog isn’t horror at all.
That’s worth saying right up front, because a reader arriving at the Sarah Waters books from a horror list needs to know what they’re buying. She writes historical fiction, mostly Victorian and mid-twentieth-century Britain, mostly with lesbian protagonists, and she’s very good at it: three Booker shortlistings, a doctorate in the subject, and a reputation for research that other historical novelists find frankly intimidating.
But The Little Stranger is a genuine horror novel, and Affinity is a genuine ghost story, and both are better than almost anything published under the horror label in the same years.
The other thing the Sarah Waters books do that horror readers should care about is the unreliable narrator. Not the shouty kind. The kind where you finish the book, sit still for a moment, and then start reconsidering everything you were told, because the narrator was never lying and was also never telling you the truth.
I haven’t read these. What follows is the critical consensus.
Fiction by René Rehn
The Short Version
Read The Little Stranger. It’s the horror novel, it’s the best-constructed thing she has written, and most readers finish it without noticing what they’ve been told.
Then Affinity if the ghost material is what you want, or Fingersmith if you want to see what she does when she isn’t being supernatural at all.
The Horror
The Little Stranger (2009)
It’s 1947 in Warwickshire, and Hundreds Hall is coming apart around the family still living inside it. Dr. Faraday, a country GP whose mother once scrubbed floors there as a nursemaid, gets called out to the house one day and never really leaves. There’s the widowed Mrs. Ayres. There’s Roderick, burned and broken by his war. And there’s Caroline, trying to run an estate that can no longer be run.
Then the house starts producing things. Marks on the walls. A dog that attacks a child at a party. A fire in a locked room. A bell ringing from a room nobody occupies.
What Waters pulls off is making the haunting and the collapse of the class system into a single event, and then refusing to pry them apart. Death duties, taxation, the land sold off piece by piece, the welfare state arriving to replace their world: the Ayreses are being destroyed right on schedule, and meanwhile something else is moving through the rooms, and the novel simply will not tell you where one force ends and the other begins.
And Faraday narrates all of it. He’s decent, careful and endlessly helpful, and he’s hiding nothing from you. He’s hiding it from himself, and every last clue sits out in plain view. Most readers sail straight past.
It was shortlisted for the Booker.
Also on ghost books and gothic fiction.
Affinity (1999)
London, 1874. Margaret Prior, an unmarried woman in her late twenties recovering from her father’s death and a suicide attempt, becomes a Lady Visitor at Millbank prison, which means visiting female prisoners as an act of charity.
She becomes fixated on Selina Dawes, a spiritualist convicted of fraud and assault after a séance went wrong and a girl died.
The prison is what you’ll remember. Millbank was real, its pentagonal design and its conditions are all documented, and Waters spent months in the archives, so the cold, the food, the silence rule and the specific cruelty of the separate system are all exactly right.
The spiritualism gets the same treatment. Waters is precise about how the séance economy actually operated, what mediums really did, and how the fraud was performed.
The last thirty pages reframe everything that came before, and it’s the most upsetting ending she has written.
It won the Somerset Maugham Award, and it’s her most genuinely frightening book.
The Rest, for Context
The rest of the Sarah Waters books aren’t horror, and it’s worth knowing what’s there.
Fingersmith (2002)
London and Marlow, 1862. Sue Trinder is raised among thieves in a house on Lant Street and gets recruited into a confidence scheme: pose as a lady’s maid to Maud Lilly, an heiress living in isolation with her uncle, and help a con man marry her and have her committed.
Then the novel turns, roughly at the halfway mark, and everything you thought you understood is wrong.
The Victorian pastiche is exactly what she’s after, and Waters is doing Wilkie Collins on purpose. The madhouse, the switched identity, the stolen inheritance and the document that changes everything are all straight out of The Woman in White, and she’s using them properly rather than just referencing them.
Maud’s uncle, and what his library actually contains, is the horror here, and the sections describing her upbringing in that house are genuinely disturbing.
It was shortlisted for both the Booker and the Orange Prize, adapted by the BBC in 2005, and adapted again by Park Chan-wook as The Handmaiden in 2016, relocated to colonial Korea.
Tipping the Velvet (1998)
Her first novel, published in 1998, and it isn’t horror at all.
Nan Astley works in her family’s oyster parlor in Whitstable, sees a male impersonator called Kitty Butler perform at the local music hall, and follows her to London.
What follows is a picaresque across the whole social range of the 1890s: the halls, then a stretch as a rent boy on the streets, then a wealthy woman’s kept mistress, then socialist politics in the East End.
The research is exceptional, and that’s true of everything she writes. The music hall material, the costumes, the slang, the specific economics of each world Nan passes through, all of it is documented.
Waters did a doctorate on lesbian and gay historical fiction, and the argument running underneath the novel is that these lives existed, left records, and simply never got written about.
Adapted by the BBC in 2002. It’s warm, funny, and entirely unlike the two gothic novels.
The Night Watch (2006)
London during and after the Second World War, told backwards.
The novel opens in 1947 with four people whose lives are diminished and unexplained, moves back to 1944, and then back again to 1941, and each section supplies the reasons for what you’ve already seen.
Kay drove an ambulance during the Blitz. Helen works at a marriage bureau. Viv is having an affair with a married soldier. Duncan was in prison and won’t say why.
The reverse structure is doing real work rather than being a trick. You meet everybody at their worst and then discover what they once were, which means the book is entirely about loss, and you know it from the first page.
The Blitz sections are the best writing she has done anywhere. The ambulance work, the bombed houses, and one particular incident involving a body are as good as anything in British fiction about that war.
Shortlisted for the Booker. No supernatural content.
The Paying Guests (2014)
London, 1922. Frances Wray and her mother have lost both sons in the war and all their money, and have to take in lodgers to keep the house in Camberwell.
Leonard and Lilian Barber move into the upstairs rooms, and Frances and Lilian begin an affair.
Then something happens about halfway through, and the novel becomes a crime story, and the last two hundred pages follow a police investigation and a trial, and two women trying to hold their nerve.
The tension in the second half comes close to unbearable, and it’s entirely procedural. There’s no mystery for the reader, only the question of whether they’ll get away with it, and what the trying is costing them.
The class material is exact. Frances is genteel and broke, the Barbers are clerk class and have money, and every single interaction in that house gets negotiated through it.
Her longest novel, and her most divisive.
Where to Start
Read The Little Stranger if you came here for horror, but read it in as few sittings as you can, and read the last page twice.
Read Affinity next if the ghost material is what you want.
And if either works on you, read Fingersmith, which isn’t horror and is the best novel among the Sarah Waters books.
The older end of the shelf is on my horror classics page. The Little Stranger belongs on my ghost books list as much as on any literary shelf.
