Intriguing Victorian gothic horror

This is an intriguing 19th century gothic horror following a family-owned luxury wallpaper company and its dirty dealings. The story's narrator in Lucy Braithwhite, the clever daughter of the family who is slowly unravelling the company's sordid history and its impact on the family.

We join the story following the death of Mr Luckhurst the company's manager and family father figure. He held things together since the death of Lucy's father in strange circumstances.

We discover that Braithwhite & Company have secret formulas which give the wallpaper its brilliant colours enabling it to outshine all the competition. But the paper contains arsenic which is slowly poisoning its customers. The family derives the ingredients from Devon mines where children toil until the mine collapses killing many of them.

As a child Lucy was repulsed by the sinister wallpaper with its exotic and hideous bird design and insisted that it be removed from her bedroom. But her younger brother died and her older brother has a mystery illness making him incapable of taking over the family business. Obviously, Lucy can't run the business as a mere woman and her brother is labelled an invalid.

To the rescue comes Mr Julian Rivers, a handsome and charismatic young man who has been with the company a number of years under the tutelage of the late Mr Luckhurst. But there is something not quite right about Mr Rivers, he insists that he is a humble servant of the family and the company, stepping in at the time of crisis, keeping arsenic stories out of the newspapers and expanding sales into the lucrative American market.

Only Lucy has sussed Mr Rivers as being an insincere and unprincipled character while her brother John and her permanently exhausted and useless mother believe Mr Rivers to be their saviour.
Both Lucy and her brother John are plagued by terrible visions of suffering children and Lucy is the only one who can piece together what has been going on and stop the dark forces.

This is a wonderfully dark Victorian gothic horror, with child exploitation, poisoning, class division and corruption. It is creepy, haunting and claustrophobic. It is based on a real-life arsenic wallpaper scandal.

Beth Eyre is excellent in the reading.

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