The Haunting of Henderson Close by Catherine Cavendish is a beautifully eerie tale of historic tours, lingering spirits, séances, and the bravery required to find answers to mysteries that brought danger upon those that went looking.
I won this beautiful hardcover copy thanks to the Flame Tree Live & Spooky Giveaway. Thank you again to the hosts! Winning this also allowed me to drop my paperback copy off at a Little Free Library to further spread the word about this amazing tale.
Let’s dive in!
My Thoughts on The Haunting of Henderson Close by Catherine Cavendish
When the book kicks off, we meet Miss Carmichael, a wonderful woman who lives in Edinburgh and pays many visits to a place called Henderson Close where she helps the poor as much as she can. But one day, she is attacked and killed.
Many years later, after the area had been built upon, a tour company allows visitors to come in through a gift shop to go underneath to explore the old area as the guides tell them about those that used to live there. The tour is supposed to be historic, but many visitors are there hoping to see the rumored ghosts.
After Hannah joins the tour company, she sees some strange things right away. While skeptical at first, she soon realizes that her experiences aren’t just her peers pulling her leg as the newbie on the crew. These rumored ghosts have proven themselves to be very real, and they need Hannah’s help.
I picked this one up on a sunny July day and sat out on my porch to read it. Boy, am I glad it was a warm and sunny day! This book left me with quite the chill!
I was sucked in immediately! In fact, I got seventy-four pages in before realizing I hadn’t paused to look up or take any notes on my favorite passages! I was just that immersed!
The atmosphere that Catherine has created here is so striking. She really plays on all of the senses when describing a scene, you’ll feel like you’re right there with the characters.
Catherine also carefully increases the volume of horror steadily throughout the story! Beginning with a few little bursts of spookiness, we soon turned the dial up to things that gave me the chills, and then the knob was all the way at max where we saw some brutal and terrifying things! I loved every minute of it!
The plot itself was brilliant. I really enjoyed that the storyline was organized in a way that slowly gives the reader more information from various perspectives until they are able to see the full picture. While there were plenty of chapter breaks, I didn’t feel like I could set this book down at all. I needed to know more!
And that ending! PHEW. I did not see any of that coming! This was such an awesome story from start to finish!
My Favorite Passages from The Haunting of Henderson Close
Greyfriars Kirkyard at night. Chill. Dark. The church ghostly in the silver moonlight. Trees denuded of leaves, their branches reaching out their skeletal fingers to the heavens. It didn’t take much imagination to see ghosts walking among the gravestones of the generations of the Edinburgh dead, slumbering – or lying unquietly – beneath their granite blankets.
She forced herself to move steadily when every pore of her being screamed at her to run. The visitors had recovered and were now chatting excitedly among themselves, moving slowly. Oh, so slowly. Behind them the banging had become an incessant loud thumping. At any minute, it sounded as if the boards would give way and something would crash through and into the Close. Hannah dreaded what that something might be.
Lucky for him the night was still pitch dark and he knew the streets so well. A sudden noise nearby startled him and he melted into the shadows of a doorway.
A sudden blast of cold air whipped past her ears, stinging them with the sharp chill. But in the trees not a leaf stirred. It was the stillest of nights.
My Final Thoughts on The Haunting of Henderson Close
This is a perfect read for fans of beautiful gothic horror that’s filled with twists and turns, with beauty and darkness, and which features characters with a lot of heart and some major bravery.
If you couldn’t already tell by the sheer number of exclamation points I used in this review, I had a blast reading this!
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Great review! This sounds like a great read.
I had so much fun with it!! 🙂