The Bone Diver

Angie Spoto

Black & White, £16.99

Angie Spoto unveiled her brand of gothic fantasy last year with The Grief Nurse, in which the members of a privileged family on a private island had their more painful emotions eased away by the psychic powers of an indentured servant class. Her fascination with insular aristocrats, class friction and the proximity of the sea carries over into The Bone Diver, but the mood is very different.

The Chicago-born author’s take on the legend of selkies is damp, salty and cold, the ancient mysteries of shape-shifting seal-humans rendered even more arcane by the presence of implacable elemental forces.

Kier Sealgair, in her early twenties, is from a family of seal hunters. But at the age of 15 she suddenly lost the ability to kill any living thing, which means she’s not much use to her mother and father, who now go out in their boat hunting without her.

Their living depends on what they make from the seal pelts they bring ashore, and over the years their best customers have been the reclusive Erskine family, who live in an old manor on a clifftop overlooking their village.

It used to be a thriving place, hosting glamorous parties, but none of the family has been seen for as long as anyone can remember, and rumours abound that Lady Erskine gave birth to four monsters who are contained by the wall and thick forest surrounding the estate.

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Dwindling catches have made for hard times, but things get worse when Kier’s father is badly injured in a bizarre accident at sea, his daughter’s long-lost hunting knife reappearing embedded in his shoulder. With Kier incapable of killing, and thus unable to take her father’s place on the boat, their livelihood is threatened.

She is, however, a very good diver, and Lady Erskine makes an unprecedented appearance in the village, saying that is exactly what she needs. If Kier comes to live in Erskine Manor until Midsummer, and makes regular dives, she’ll pay more than enough to offset her parents’ losses.

And so Kier finally sees inside the infamous manor and meets the siblings who live there – not monsters at all, just four eccentric, dashingly-dressed adults who have never set foot outside the estate. Initially, they are stand-offish to the “seal killer” from the village, except for younger sister Breagha, who takes a shine to her. Breagha alone, it seems, understands why she and her siblings have been confined there, and how Kier can help them.

Spoto’s writing has a tremendous vividness, conjuring up dramatic images of a mansion which is permanently cold, damp, confoundingly hard to navigate and evidently rotting away. It’s built, Kier is told, over sea caves. The trees outside drink seawater and even their sap, it’s said, tastes of salt.

An annoying leak from the ceiling leads Kier upstairs, to where a woman with a seal’s dark eyes lies in a bath. But she’s not deterred from her job, which is to dive into deep wells in the forest and retrieve old bones from the bottom. For what reason, the aloof Lady Erskine won’t say.

Above all else, The Bone Diver is heavy on atmosphere. Nowhere, whether it’s the village pub or tailor’s shop, is quite free of the sense of weirdness that enshrouds and pervades Spoto’s novel. Faced with an ocean and a forest that give the impression of having a kind of lofty sentience, even Kier’s lung-bursting dives and the mysterious secrets guarded by Lady Erskine pale in comparison. It’s a pungent, highly effective slice of folklore-inspired fantasy.