When Ashley Smith – a bright-eyed but lonely American studying in London – is invited to spend Christmas with her classmate’s family at their Cotswolds manor house, it seems like a perfect country idyll. And for Ashley – who records it all in her diary – there’s the added romantic potential of her friend’s twin brother, Adam, who she thinks could be her wildest dream come true. But is there something strange about the old house, both stately and rundown? What could the motives of the mysterious Chapman family be? And what holiday horrors might be lying in wait?

I bought ‘The Christmas Guest’ for two reasons: to sample Peter Swanson’s work and to have a good Christmas story to listen to in the car as my wife and I drove North to be with family. It exceeded my expectations on both counts. 

I love the way Peter Swanson writes: the clarity of the prose, the clever structure of the storytelling, the perfectly conjured settings and the believable characters. I’m now looking forward to reading his thriller, ‘The Kind Worth Killing’ later this year.

For me, ‘The Christmas Guest‘ is an example of what a good, dark, Christmas story should be.

It takes place in two classic settings for Christmas stories, a Manhattan condo and an English country house. It starts in a present-day Christmas, with a woman in her thirties, who has chosen to spend the holiday alone in her apartment, again, deciding to do a bit of decluttering and coming across a handwritten journal that describes a much earlier Christmas, spent in an English country house, when she was a teenager, attending the Courtauld Institute of Art. The next part of the story is told through diary entries, describing how a young American girl gets to spend her first Christmas in rural England at the home of a fellow student. The tone of the storytelling changes as the young woman describes the almost overwhelming newness and strangeness of a Christmas spent in a big house in the woods. It darkens slowly and she observes some of the dark dynamics in the family and develops a sense of threat when she becomes aware that someone is lurking in the woods between the house and the village and that a young girl was recently killed in those woods.

I found both setting and the ‘voices’ through which they were told convincing and engaging. At the start of the story, I identified with the desire for solitude at Christmas and I smiled at the woman’s pleasure in having an opportunity to declutter undisturbed. The shift to reading the decades-old diary entries gave a reflective, visiting the spirit of Christmas Past tone to the story that I enjoyed, as did moving from seeing the world through the eyes of a middle-aged woman settled into a solitary life through to a teenaged woman, abroad for the first time and open to everything the experience has to offer.

But there was much more to this story than some Christmas reminiscences. This is a dark tale, filled with life-threatening secrets and transgressions. Peter Swanson did a superb job in structuring and pacing his story to create a growing sense of threat while increasing my investment in the person threatened. 

Then came the twist that changed my understanding of everything and made the story richer and much darker. It wasn’t a last-minute cheat of a twist. Peter Swanson had constructed the whole story around it. The twist drives the story to the very last page.

I ended the story deeply satisfied with the journey that Peter Swanson had taken me on. It was a Christmas gift in it’s own right.

I recommend the audiobook version of ‘The Christmas Guest’ narrated by Esther Wane who did a splendid job of matching her narration to the shifting tones of the text.