'Angelina Yves is a struggling singer/songwriter offered the chance of a lifetime to join the experimental luxury compound sponsored by the most famous band in the world, Black Idyll. With her every need accommodated, she finally has the time and space to perfect her music. Her muse? Reclusive rock star Jesper Idyll, who lives up to her every high school daydream. But this paradise has a haunted underbelly heralded by screaming horses, mysterious figures in the night, and dreams too twisted to be real. When people start to disappear and Jesper's ex turns up dead and hideously mutilated, Angelina begins to suspect that something malevolent lurks behind the cult that's grown around the band...'
As anyone who's a creative will know the biggest obstacle towards being able to actually create your art is, at it's roots, capitalism. When you have to give the vast majority of your time over to working just to make sure that you don't end up on the street, or starving, or unable to fund your art, finding the time and energy to actually sit and create something that truly matters to you is incredibly difficult. There's a reason starving artist is a stereotype, because if you want to actually have the time to do art you often have to go without.
This is the situation that Angelina Yves finds herself in at the beginning of House of Idyll. Working as a barista in a busy Los Angeles coffee shop, dealing with difficult customers and angry influencers, she spends her days rushed off her feet, barely able to afford to stay in the city that's supposed to be full of opportunity; let alone finding the time to actually work on her music. When a bad day hits Angelian she finds herself losing both of her jobs, and her accommodation, in one fell swoop. Sitting on the street, trying to figure out what to do she simply starts singing as a way of dealing with everything. That's when a car rolls up beside her, a handsome stranger she met earlier in the day offering her the opportunity to make a new life for herself and to explore her art.
Despite every logical reason not to get into a car with a strange man, Angelina does so, and is taken away from L.A. to a remote compound in the countryside. It's here that she meets its owner, Jesper Idyll, lead singer of the most successful band in the world, Black Idyll. He tells Angelina that he's created a compound for artists, one where their accommodation, food, clothing, and any other needs are catered for by his vast wealth. Initially sceptical, thinking that this is perhaps a cult of some kind, Angelina decides to roll the dice on the offer to join the community and focus on her singing. At first, things seem to be fine, but when Angelina starts to notice strange events, and mysterious disappearances, she suspects that perhaps there's something more sinister happening.
House of Idyll is a fairly shot read, and as such you'd expect that things would unfold fairly quickly. However, the novella isn't afraid to take its time in creating a slow burn story that lulls you into a false sense of safety before things begin to shift; giving the reader a similar experience to Angelina. Despite being a horror book, most of House of Idyll doesn't read that way, and with a few small changes the book could have easily been a story about a young woman living her dream life and falling in love with her idol. But this is a horror, and so there's a slowly building sense of dread that starts to creep into the narrative, and whilst these moments are some of the better parts of the book I found that they happened far too infrequently for me, and that I'd have preferred a bigger focus on these elements than we got.
Angelina is also something of a difficult protagonist. There are times when she seems pretty competent, sharing her location with friends and family as she's taken away in a car by a strange man, and being doubtful of the artists retreat for example. Despite this she also goes along with things far too quickly and easily. There are a lot of red flags, a lot of things that happen that scream cult behaviour, and whilst she's unsure of things to begin with she kind of just shrugs her shoulders and goes along with things most of the time. 'It can't be a cult, all of the people here who wear white, go to community activities, and idolise the person in charge say it's not a cult' sounds like the reasoning someone would have when they're trying to convince themselves they're not in a very obvious cult.
I guess I can chalk these inconsistencies up to the fact that perhaps Angelina is somewhat naïve, that she's being carefully manipulated by people who know what they're doing, or that they're even influencing and controlling the people at the compound with drugs and subliminal messages; but it still feels incredibly frustrating that every time Angelina begins to question things around her she gives up on looking further into it within a few pages because someone goes 'nah, it's good'. This might be down to the fact that the book is short, and that there's not really enough space in which to allow these doubts to play out for longer; but it just makes it feel like Angelina doesn't really have much development or agency for the vast majority of the book.
I was also somewhat frustrated by the books ending. I'm not against a story that doesn't explain everything, that allows for ambiguity, but I don't think that fully worked with House of Idyll. The final climactic scenes could have done with a bit more time to show things better, to make it clearer what was happening and to give the readers more time to take in the conclusion. As it is, the book ends somewhat abruptly, and you have to make up your own mind as to what happened.
The supporting cast is fairly light, mainly due to the fact that those that do feature do very little, and most of the characters have this fake, almost brainwashed exterior to them. This works for a cult-like setting, but it also means that most of the characters kind of bleed into each other, with very few of them having any really clear or defined personality; and those that I do remember are only because of what happens to them in the plot, not because of who they are. Even the band members of Black Idyll outside of lead singer Jesper feel very much the same, and the times that they appeared and did things it could have been any of them, their personalities being so similar that nothing would feel out of character in their actions if you swapped the names around. This led me to feeling largely unconnected to many of the characters, and I think some of the events lost a little of their impact because of this.
House of Idyll is a pretty decent read, one that is short and enjoyable, and whilst I think it would have worked better by either leaning more into the horror elements or by simply being a story about an artist finding inspiration in this community, it doesn't make the book a bad read. I enjoyed it, and was glad to have read it; and it's short length means that the times I did find myself having issues with the story didn't linger long before events moves onto the next thing. Whilst not perfectly what I'd look for in a book House of Idyll is an enjoyable novella that I think will appeal to readers.
House of Idyll is available now from Titan Books.
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