A House and Its Head is the first Ivy Compton-Burnett novel I’ve read, and I had no real notion of what to expect. Nothing quite prepared me for this dark and twisted tale of family—if “family” is even the right word.

The first chapter—which, like most of the book, is composed almost entirely of dialogue—introduces us to Duncan and Ellen Edgeworth on Christmas morning in 1885. They’re waiting for the children to come down. Cozy, right? No. Duncan and Ellen are in their sixties, and their two daughters are twenty-four and “nearly eighteen.” Also staying with them is Grant, their nephew (25). From the beginning, things feel off in this home. Why exactly? It’s hard to pinpoint—but something in the biting, elliptical dialogue between these so-called “children” put me on edge.

Ellen struck me as the most “normal,” largely because she seemed the most outside the world of this home. It’s clear she has had to endure the horrors of living with Duncan all these years and when illness strikes she finally says something true:

“I can’t help what Father says: I must stay at home today. People must sometimes be ill. I have been ill less often than l ought in my life, because Father hated illness. I must some times be like other people. This house has to be so different from other houses; and lately I have felt it is too much for me, all this difference.”

But she is not our anchor for long. The novel plunges into a world of affairs and seductions—no, that’s too tame. A world of incest, abuse, and desire that leads to murderous thoughts.

So did I like A House and Its Head? It was not a pleasant read, that’s for sure. But it was fascinating—morbidly so—and powerfully rendered in its depiction of cruelty and coercion in this particularly grotesque domestic theater.