Review of Belle Vue by C.S. Alleyne - Uniquely Unsettling
I absolutely love stories that involve asylums. I went into Belle Vue ready for angry ghosts and hauntings and came out with something completely different. There is a slow burn to this book that I attribute to old English Gothic tales (think Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw) and I felt myself trudging a bit through some of it, but I felt like the overall outcome was something uniquely unsettling that I was pleased to have read.
We begin with Claire and Alex, a young couple in University going about their lives and trying to juggle their personal situations and schoolwork. It was very relatable to my own University experience and the weight of all that homework, so those parts hit the nail on the head for me. Then things start to twist as Claire suddenly finds herself in need of a place to live.
A flyer for Belle Vue, a former asylum turned apartment/condo building, falls into her hands at just the right moment. There is a sense of fate and serendipity throughout the whole story that starts with this moment, doesn’t let up, and turns out to be a huge plot point by the end. As things begin to fall into place and Claire moves into Belle Vue, it seems like the life is being sucked out of her and she finds herself helpless to stop it.
The history of Belle Vue is pertinent to what Alex is already writing his dissertation on, so he begins his investigation into its past, which is riddled with mystery and malevolence that connects to a current tenant and consequently, Claire. As time goes on, Claire and Alex begin to drift apart because of what Belle Vue is doing to them, and a dark turn that I did not see coming splits them up and changes the trajectory of the story.
C.S. Alleyne’s style is to flicker from the past to the present in each chapter, so you feel like time is fluid, which contributes to the meaning of the story significantly. There are some supernatural events occurring here that defy the natural world, but they are offered in such a ‘normal’ way that it feels like a lesson in what might happen to people with too much money and power. There is seemingly no set protagonist here. We end up following quite a few different people around throughout the story and some of them were more antagonistic. I found that a bit confusing at times, but the distraction kept me wondering what would happen next.
The smooth rhythm of the writing kept me going, especially in the last chapter. I enjoyed the dreadful feeling C.S. Alleyne captured of an asylum in both the past and the present, because the ‘lunatics’ and the people wrongfully put in there were often interchangeable. It’s such a sad thing to think about. My favorite parts in the story were the descriptions of the crypts, the asylum itself, and the plight of being a student.
After reading the “About the Author” section, I discovered that these are some of her favorite things too, so that would explain why she’s so good at writing about them! A big thank you to Crystal Lake Publishing for providing an ARC copy for me to review.
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