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Celia Fremlin: The Queen of Domestic Horror

Posted on 30th August, 2023 in Book Review

I’ve got a craze on Celia Fremlin’s novels.  I can’t stop reading them, and as soon as I finish the latest batch of two or three I order another lot. Fremlin (1914-2009) wrote sixteen novels and since I discovered them a few weeks ago I’ve read seven of them, as well as one of the short story collections.

It all started with The Hours Before Dawn (1958), Fremlin’s first published novel. I was hooked from the first sentence: “I’d give anything – anything – for a night’s sleep.” Immediately you feel the desperation in the words – especially if, like me, you have trouble sleeping.

Louise is a sleep-deprived mother whose baby won’t stop crying. She’s struggling to be a good wife to a husband who does nothing around the house (those were the days when no one expected them to); a good mother (she has two other children); and a good neighbour. She’s exhausted, not only by the physical effort, but also by all the judgements and demands pressing upon her in those roles. Her husband, Mark, is tired and irritable after a day’s work and blames her for the “shambles” of screaming children and messy house; the nurse at the Infant Welfare Clinic masks her low opinion of Louise’s maternal skills with “patience crackling from her starched sleeve like machine-gun fire”; the neighbour complains constantly about the screaming baby.

The family doesn’t have a lot of money either, so to make ends meet they take a lodger. And that’s where this everyday tale of an exhausted woman who is barely coping turns sinister – and downright terrifying. And how does Fremlin convey the sense of unease that creeps over Louise as the weeks pass? By locating it all in Louise’s imagination: in disturbing dreams; the inexplicable patter of bare feet on a landing; the effect on a sleep-deprived woman’s nerves of sitting up on her own with her screaming baby in a cold, dark scullery.

Fremlin’s novels have domestic settings, but hers is a dark and unsettling domesticity. Several themes run through all the books I’ve read so far: the competitiveness between mothers (whose baby is the perfect weight, whose child got the most O levels, whose child dropped out of university…), which makes some women feel inadequate and drains them of confidence. The prying, gossip and rumour-mongering which have horrific consequences. The awful plight of parents whose children won’t leave home but expect to be housed, fed, and waited on hand and foot. The marriages dying under the burden of gender roles reinforced by fear of social ostracism, with male breadwinners feeling excluded from family life and housewives worn out by ceaseless domestic labour.

None of which makes the books sound like very amusing reads, but in fact there’s a great deal of wit and humour in them. They sometimes make you laugh out loud (well they do me anyway). They’re page-turners in the best tradition of must-stay-awake-to-finish-it books, and not devoid of a twist or two either. The prose is elegant, the family dynamics brilliantly handled, and if anyone can bring out the malice in the mundane, it’s Celia Fremlin. And if sometimes the endings are a bit on the over-wrought side, or the characters prone to a bit of scenery-chewing as their true natures are exposed, it only adds to the enjoyment.

(I’ve read The Hours Before Dawn, The Long Shadow, Uncle Paul, Possession, The Trouble-Makers, The Jealous One, and The Spider-Orchard; and short stories By Horror Haunted.)

Celia Fremlin’s books are published by Faber – for more information see their website .