Published by Solaris in July 2025
Review by Veronika Groke
Dundee-based author duo MK Hardy’s debut novel The Needfire is a Sapphic Gothic mystery set in the 1890s, in the wake of the Scottish Highland Clearances that saw many people evicted from their homes by landlords intent on repurposing the land for more profitable uses such as sheep farming.
Tired of being the secret add-on to her female lover’s conventional family setup, Norah Mackenzie escapes the civilised but suffocating confines of the Glasgow home she shares with her nagging mother to take her chances with a man she’s never met in person: Alexander Barland, Lord of the gloomy and somewhat rundown Corrain House in the high north of Scotland.
Though braced for sparsity and a lack of society, Norah is unprepared for what she finds: a house on a crumbling cliff, built around a monstrous ancient tree that seems to both anchor and defy its presence, and inhabited by a distant and reticent man who bears no resemblance to the thoughtful, eloquent personality that had emerged from his letters. And then there is Gunn, the enigmatic housekeeper, whose ostensive subservience Norah soon learns hides an iron will – as well as possibly questionable motives of her own. As Norah tries to find a role for herself in her new home and build a connection with its people, each small success seems to be followed by a bigger setback. Out of her depth and troubled by disturbing dreams and visions, Norah soon finds herself doubting not only her decision, but her very sanity.
Place and people in The Needfire are intimately connected. The apparition that roams Corrain’s dark halls– a half-mechanical stag– is like a manifestation of both Alexander’s grandfather’s desire to bring ‘progress’ to the region at all costs and the ‘twisted’ nature that resulted from it. Its opposing force in the battle for Norah’s mind is the equally twisted rowan tree, a tree traditionally planted at the entrance to protect the threshold. Its unusual location at the heart of the house seems to mark the entire house out as a threshold of sorts. ‘You are afraid of the border places,’ the unnamed narrator who at intervals addresses Norah or the reader tells us in one of the novel’s most beautifully haunting passages: ‘that strand of silver that divides the land from the sea’, ‘all those with one foot in this world and one in the next’, ‘the moments between not knowing and knowing’ – the liminal spaces full of undecidedness, in which contradicting truths can exist all at once; boundaries that are made to be crossed or not, but not permanently inhabited in the unsettling way the residents of Corrain House seem to do.
As the novel progresses, Gunn herself reveals herself more and more to be a kind of border place of her own. The product of the merging of two very different bloodlines, she sees herself purely as the heir to her maternal legacy – the dispossessed people of the land, the wise women unjustly branded witches – while rejecting, and in fact hating, her father. However, the way in which devotion and domination, cruelty and care become inseparable, even indistinguishable, in her actions brings up the question as to how far it is possible to escape, or at least go beyond, the blood ties that shape us to create an identity and, ultimately, a destiny of one’s own.
Blood is a recurrent theme in the novel altogether, appearing in a surprising variety of different forms: besides the often troubling configurations of blood relatedness, we get sacrificial blood, menstrual blood, birth blood. There is something distinctly vampiric about the degree to which the inhabitants of the house resemble the portraits and visions of their forebears that keep haunting Norah, as if they might be more than just younger replicas of those images. However, when the revelation of what is really going on finally comes, it is altogether more interesting and unexpected. Without giving anything away, let me just say that it puts a different spin on the idea of ‘nurture vs nature’.
While The Needfire has all the trappings you would expect from a good Gothic novel – a beautifully evoked oppressive atmosphere, an isolated heroine surrounded by secretive figures full of dubious intent and struggling not to succumb to madness and despair – the love story between Norah and the darkly alluring Gunn adds a special dimension to the story. The way the authors manage to develop their relationship in an entirely believable way, and without ever jolting the reader out of the novel’s period setting, is impressive. In part, this is achieved by having most of the most intimate conversations happen in writing, which frees the characters from having to acknowledge their feelings face to face. However, what is written and what is said are often quite incongruous with each other, and, like everything in The Needfire, even the most sincere words can’t always be trusted to mean what they appear to…
The one weakness of the novel is the sharp increase in pace in its second half, which made me struggle to keep up with what was happening at times. While, according to the acknowledgements, the authors were forced by circumstances to finish the second half within three weeks, I would have loved for the relationship between Norah and Gunn to have had the time to resolve itself in a more convincing way. Having said that, the last few lines, which convey a myriad of meanings without saying anything directly, are a thing of beauty, as indeed is the writing for the most part. So if you have a taste for the Gothic, the darkly historical or slightly sinister Sapphic romances, you’d have trouble finding a better read than this.