THE INFAMOUS GILBERTS

If Shirley Jackson moved The Addams Family to the English countryside, something like this dark, tongue-in-cheek epic might result.

“Welcome to Thornwalk, home of the last of the Wynford Gilberts—Lydia, Hugo, Annabel, Jeremy, and Rosalind.” Tomaski’s archly but deeply gothic debut is presented in the form of a house tour, conducted by an enigmatic man named Maximus, eventually revealed to have played a role in the events. His tour consists of 70 short chapters, each of which explains the provenance of some blemish or irregularity in the family mansion, now empty and about to be converted into a hotel. From “The Bolt on the Blue-room Door” and “The Burn on the Library Rug” to “The Missing Model Ship” and “A Squashed Blackcurrant,” each stop on the tour has a backstory. “Come through, come through,” he urges us, “climb the staircase,” directing our progress through the house and its grounds and outbuildings, gradually filling in the outlines of the family’s miserably unhappy history from the 1920s to the early 2000s. His butler-ish voice (though he was not their butler) and his undimmed reverence for the five damaged siblings—madness, narcissism, kleptomania, violence, and a wide variety of other dysfunctional traits run in the family—set the non-judgmental tone of the revelations. A favorite character is the middle child, Annabel, who, despite being kept out of society and drugged daily to control what seems like epilepsy, is arguably the most normal of the bunch. Indeed, Wes Anderson might have a field day with the Gilberts and their storied ruins. “How well I have managed this,” the narrator reassures himself midway through. “It is almost in order and beginning to form quite a coherent little story.” Readers with a penchant for elegant horror played for comedy will likely agree, though toward the end, the narrative lingers for quite a while on an abusive domestic relationship, and one wishes to head to the gift shop.

This distinctive debut introduces a wickedly weird new talent.