A Face at the Window: A Novel

“An irresistible tale that ventures into the ghostly realms of psychology, personality and intimacy” from the bestselling author of The Music Room (San Francisco Chronicle).  When their daughter leaves for college, newly minted empty nesters Cookson and Ellen Selway decide to escape the eerie quiet of their home and take a trip to London. But not long after arriving, it becomes apparent that the Selways have traded one unsettling locale for another. Like Cookson, a recovering alcoholic and drug addict, the Hotel Willerton has a disturbing past. Fifty years ago, a young girl fell to her death from one of the hotel’s windows, and her ghost is haunting Cookson, slowly drawing him back toward the darkness that once consumed him. As Cookson descends into a spiral of self-destruction, he is joined by two more apparitions, each reflecting the worst parts of himself and forcing him to confront the mistakes of his past that have tormented him for years. From the celebrated author of the Washington Post Best Book of the Year Nostalgia and the New York Times–bestselling The Music Room, this is “a gripping, stylish, consistently entertaining novel” that offers a literary spin on the traditional ghost story (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution).

Amazon.com Review

A Face at the Window is a rare treat--a critically acclaimed literary novel that is also a charming tale of the supernatural. The plot is a bit like Stephen King's The Shining: a man who is sober after years of alcohol abuse undergoes a mid-life crisis while staying in a haunted hotel, and gets so involved with the ghosts he becomes estranged from his wife. The emphasis here, though, is on how the personalities of three ghosts (a violently drunken man, an adolescent girl with a split personality, and a bratty boy) mirror long-standing anxieties within the narrator. As the Boston Book Review writes, "By cleverly shifting the mystery of the novel from action to character, ... McFarland is able to imply that underlying our everyday lives are forces as inexplicable, with as much potential for horror, as any spine tingling tale." But we horror readers already knew that, didn't we?

From Library Journal

A man encounters the ghost of a young girl and becomes engrossed in the details of her former life, unaware that he's endangering his own life as well as his family's. From the literary hotshot who gave us The Music Room (LJ 4/1/90).Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

The window is in the top-floor flat of London's Willerton Hotel, where Americans Cookson and Ellen Selway are spending a month--just after their much-loved daughter Jordie leaves for boarding school. Ellen, a mystery-series author, plans to send her female Episcopal-priest sleuth to London in her next book. Cookson, a recovering alcoholic/drug addict, "clean" for many years, made a bundle first selling drugs and then operating a trendy restaurant; he now manages family investments (and accompanies his wife on research trips). But strange things happen at the Willerton: he hears piano music no one else hears, in rooms where no one lives; he sees and interacts with mysterious people--invisible to everyone else--linked to the tragic fall of a young woman from that same window 60 years earlier. The ex-addict is addicted again, exploring a puzzle that estranges him from others as it endangers them. As in The Music Room (1990) and School for the Blind (1994) and his prizewinning short fiction, McFarland's three-dimensional characters weave an involving spell. Mary Carroll

From Kirkus Reviews

McFarland's old strengths (The Music Room, 1990; School for the Blind, 1994) are less evident this time: His often golden style survives, but psychology and focus are bungled in this tale of a man paying for the sins of his past through encounters with ghosts in the present. Cookson Selway travels for a month in London with his wife Ellen, a writer of mystery novels who wants to do location research. The couple book into the quaint Hotel Willerton, where all seems fine until Cook begins acting strangely, cursing in his sleep, waking up exhausted and reeking of whiskey--all signs of relapse into the depraved life of drugs and booze he'd lived earlier while making his millions as a drugged and dishonest restaurateur in Manhattan and before the purifying miracle of his daughter Jordie's birth (Jordie, now a teenager, is in boarding school back in Cambridge). As much as Ellen pleads, and as much as Cook swears he'll pull himself together, ``The Strange Business at the Hotel Willerton'' forms a spiral downward--though a painfully slow one as hint after pseudo-Jamesian hint crawls by (``This wordy explanation will have to do. It's the only one I have'') before the ``ghosts'' in the old hotel finally manifest themselves openly by sucking energy from the living Cook. By that time, the ghosts' tales of family murder and long-ago vileness will seem related only distantly to the sins of Cook's own reams-ago and dimly remembered life (his redneck father, one cause of early Cookian guilt, murdered a black man and got off easy), and what takes over instead of deepening character are the mechanics of how ghosts function and what they do. `` `I'm very tired,' '' one of them says, `` `This takes a toll, you know, all this emerging. It's a great pleasure in its own way, but it does take a toll.' '' Many will concur at the finish of this tiresome book that aimed high, but got paled out, then hit low. (Literary Guild selection; $50,000 ad/promo; author tour) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

San Francisco Chronicle

“An irresistible tale that ventures into the ghostly realms of psychology, personality and intimacy.”

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“A gripping, stylish, consistently entertaining novel.”

Redbook

“Although Dennis McFarland’s new novel is brimming with the paranormal, its deepest mysteries have to do with the workings of our hearts and minds, and with the specters of family history.”

From the Publisher

The New York Times hailed School for the Blind as "an accomplished novel--the language soars."The Chicago Tribune called the novel "an evocative, haunting story--beautifully constructed and told."

From the Inside Flap

g their only daughter off to boarding school, Cookson Selway and his wife, Ellen, travel to London to escape their empty, echoing house. But their quiet hotel has guests other than those on the register, and the vacation turns into a journey not only to another city but to another time. As Selway is drawn into a series of mysterious encounters with a young girl who died in a fall from his hotel window sixty years earlier, he finds that the shadowy rooms and characters of her life become more real to him than those of his own. An escapist with an alcoholic history, he secretly relishes the chance to move from his lackluster reality into the high drama of the girl's past. But as he begins to do so, he jeopardizes his marriage and the lives of those around him, and the consequences of his escape are far greater than he could ever have imagined.

About the Author

Dennis McFarland is a bestselling author of novels and stories. His short fiction has appeared in the American Scholar, the New Yorker, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, Best American Short Stories, and many other publications. He has received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, where he has also taught creative writing. He lives in rural Vermont with his wife, writer and poet Michelle Blake.

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