#AudiobookReview ‘The Veil’ by Rachel Harrison read by Louisa Krause

About the book…

Sally has recently left an unfulfilling job to volunteer at a living history museum, where she is assigned to the Death House. Every day, she dons Victorian mourning garb and describes traditional funeral services to tourists. It sounds depressing as hell, but for Sally, it’s less depressing than her tepid marriage to her childhood sweetheart.

This becomes all too clear when she accidentally travels through time and space to a liminal world where the ghosts of the living history museum haunt its grounds. There, she meets and falls hard for Victorian-era pretty boy Nathaniel. Their heady, romantic encounters douse Sally in the sad reality that her marriage is anything but and leave her tempted to join Nathaniel permanently in his realm.

Is Sally’s marriage literally a fate worse than death, or is there another way altogether?

An Audible original , read by Louisa Krause,   ‘The Veil’ by Rachel Harrison is available as a part of the Plus catalogue, so this comes with any Audible membership .

I thoroughly enjoyed it, the narrator does a fantastic job of creating a creepy and uneasy atmosphere, as well as pulling you into the world of a historical village. It is kind of like the Museum Of Welsh Life at St Fagans

Pretty much all of our school trips went there, we were constantly reminded as school kids how grateful we could choose to be, sat in the drafty, echoey and freezing Victorian schoolroom. We could have been caned, made to wear the dunces cap, and write with fountain pens on a daily basis. Our teachers had blissfully forgotten that they threw chalkboard runners and chalk at our heads, made left handed kids sit on their left hands as they were being ‘wilful’, not using their right one, and stood in the corner for getting sums wrong. Ah…good times!

Anyway, St Fagans is a working museum where there are bakers, ironmongers, tanners and weavers so you can see what life in olden times was like. It has a row of homes, each decorated in a different decade, a town hall, and so much more, it is so worth a visit if you are passing.

So I fell straight into Sally’s world, and loved the concept of the Veil, a see through and flimsy piece of material which prevents one from fully seeing what is in front of your eyes. The wedding veil separates you from maid to wife, the act of lifting it to lay eyes on your betrothed is one which Sally, I think, wishes she could undo. So when she accidentally falls asleep in the hearse and awakens to find herself in another dimension.

Suddenly she is back in ‘them days’ where she meets Nathaniel, a perfect example of a man who would die for her. So on the one hand, she has her childhood sweetheart who is a complete meathead and as sophisticated as a tinned pie, and on the other, a Bridgeton-esque swoonfest.

Between them both, there is the veil of reality and expectation, sexual desire and fulfilment, in this brief story of ghostly goings on, and a woman who considers the past to treat her way better than the present currently does.

I found the hour long tale passed more quickly than I anticipated, the growing chilliness and realisation of what was at stake was a delight as was the superb , and fitting, ending.

About the author…

Rachel Harrison is the author of ‘The Return’, nominated for a Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel. Her short fiction has appeared in Guernica and Electric Lit.

She lives in New York with her husband and their cat/overlord.

Twitter @rachfacelogic 

Links-https://www.rachel-harrison.com/