The Raven by Susan McCauley: A Plague-Year Gothic Horror That Freezes You Slowly

Grief, faith and madness braid into a slow, disturbing plague-year gothic horror.

Susan McCauley’s The Raven drops a decent man into the plague winter of 1665 and watches the ice close over him. Martin Blake mends shoes near a Yorkshire village while the plague eats London and creeps north. He kills a raven by accident. He takes in four orphaned children at his uncle-in-law’s word. Then death visits his own hearth, and his grip begins to slip. This is gothic horror in a folk-tale key: short, cold and patient. It asks whether a man is haunted by guilt, by God, or by something with black eyes. Our full review is below.

The Raven by Susan McCauley: A Plague-Year Gothic Horror That Freezes You Slowly

The worst harm done to a child rarely wears a monster’s face. It comes with a warm smile. A heavy purse. A hand on the shoulder, and a verse ready on the tongue. That cold idea sits at the heart of Susan McCauley’s short, bitter novel. It is the thing that lifts a plague-year ghost story clear of the usual candle-and-cobweb fare.

The setup is plain enough to fit on a gravestone. Martin Blake is a cobbler. He lives outside York in the killing winter of 1665. He has a wife he adores, Susanna. He has a small son, Thomas. And he has a childhood of beatings that he keeps folded away like a rag he cannot throw out. Then the parish rector arrives. Elliot is Susanna’s uncle, and he presses four orphaned children on the family for a shrinking stipend. The household tips from poor to desperate. Soon after, Martin kills a raven in a trap meant for rabbits. Susanna reads the death as an omen. The reader learns to trust her long before Martin does.

The cleverest tool in the book is its point of view. McCauley shifts between heads inside a single scene. We sit in Susanna’s fear, in Martin’s rage, in young Martha’s watching, all at once. It sounds like a recipe for a mess. It works as a trap. We are handed things the characters do not know. Then we are made to wait while they walk towards them. We know what a raven means before Martin will say it. We know what is in his cupboard before the children go looking. That gap, between what we see and what they see, is where the fear lives. She holds it open as long as she can bear.

Take the scene on the stairs. Martin climbs to the loft where the children sleep. Martha is seventeen, standing in for a mother she has just lost. She hears his tread and tells the little ones to feign sleep. Clod, creak, clod, creak. Martin reaches the boys. He does them no harm. He unfurls a blanket and tucks it round them with an almost tender smile. Then he crosses to Martha and tucks a second blanket over her too.

Nothing happens. That is the horror of it. The extra warmth is real. So is the weight of him standing over her in the dark, watching. McCauley lets both sit in one breath. A man tucking children into bed is a picture of care. A man who has begun to do the unforgivable, tucking children into bed, is something you read with your jaw tight. The gesture never changes. Only what we know of the hand behind it does. That is the whole book in one small scene.

The prose moves like Martin’s own awl. The same plain stitch, over and over. Each puncture is small enough to ignore. Then you look up and find the thing has been sewn shut around you. McCauley writes in short, clean lines that mirror a mind coming apart. Thought snags on thought.

The same phrases circle back, the way grief circles the same three memories. Some readers will call the repetition heavy. I call it load-bearing. When Martin rocks back and forth, back and forth, the line rocks with him. When the ravens gather at the glass and go peck, peck, peck, the sound gets into your teeth. This is plainness used on purpose. She trusts the cold to do the work that ten adjectives could not.

She is just as sure with the sights Martin cannot trust. In his wife’s looking glass he sees Susanna again, whole and rosy and well. He reaches for her. Then her skin turns to marble. Her cheeks fall grey. Her eyes sink and cloud like boiled eggs, and the face in the glass becomes a raven. Later he lays a frozen little body in the bed and speaks to it as his son. It is not his son.

We know that. He does not. McCauley writes these turns from the inside, so we slip when Martin slips. We are never quite sure, from one line to the next, whether we are seeing the room or seeing his mind. Is this grief? Is it guilt? Is it something with black eyes and a beak? She never answers. That refusal is the engine of the whole thing.

The raven itself is handled with real care. A weaker book would let the bird turn into a logo. Here it earns every entrance. It starts as guilt. One dead creature and its grieving mate. It swells into an unkindness of ravens, massing against a bruised sky. At the worst moment, one of them screeches Martin’s own cry back at him. His grief, turned to mockery in a beak.

And the last raven of the book watches from a headstone, then lifts into a clear spring sky, and may never have been there at all. McCauley will not tell you if the birds are punishment, omen, or the work of a broken man. She lets the question stand. Standing is what makes it land.

A spoiler follows in this paragraph, so skip ahead if you want the reveal to land clean. The reason Martin’s fall reads as tragedy, not melodrama, is the secret under his whole marriage. Thomas, the son he loved past reason, was not his by blood. Susanna was got with child by her own uncle, the jolly-faced rector. Her family chose the lie over the shame and branded her a fornicator.

Martin married her to shield her. He raised another man’s child as his own. And he swore an oath to carry the truth to his grave. So the Nietzsche line in the foreword, about a man who fights monsters becoming one, is not decoration. McCauley means it flat. The beaten boy grows into the man who fails the children in his care. The real monster keeps a warm hearth, a fat belly, and a place in the church. The book’s coldest verdict is not aimed at the madman in the crypt. It is aimed at the man in the cassock who made him.

The confrontation in the crypt is the book at full power. Martin, freed at last of his oath, turns on the man who ruined them all. It is ugly, and it is earned, and the violence reads as the only mercy on offer.

The truth only comes out because an archbishop happens to be standing in the shadows of the crypt, having heard every word. It is a coincidence the size of a cathedral. It does the moral work the story should have left to its own people. What comes after is tidier still. The villain is undone.

The good curate inherits the church. He marries the orphan girl in the spring. Read one way, that is grace after so much cold. Read another, it is a folk tale pulling its punch at the very end. A novel this willing to sit in the dark should have trusted the dark to close it. The neat bow does not spoil what comes before. It does keep a very good book from being a great one.

The period pressure is well judged, and it is more than costume. The church holds the whip hand over every life in these pages. Alms come with strings. Stipends shrink when it suits the man handing them out. Grief is met with a line about death being the price of sin. McCauley even threads in the real Archbishop of York of the day, which grounds the dread in something that once drew breath. Faith here is not comfort. It is a lever, and the wrong men are pulling it. And the children pay first. That is the pattern of the whole book. The small and the poor are spent to keep the powerful warm.

Martha is the still point in all this. She is seventeen, orphaned, and half a mother already. She keeps the small ones fed and quiet while the house comes down around her. Her courage is the one warm coal in the grate, and the book is smart to keep it there.

For company on the shelf, start with Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black, which McCauley names as an early spark. Both grow a chill out of quiet. Then Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart, for a man undone by the thing he killed and a sound that will not stop. Reach further and you meet Michelle Paver’s Wakenhyrst, another old English gothic where faith, obsession and a watchful bird sour a house from within. For the grief at the core, the dead child that pulls a parent over the edge, the shadow of Pet Sematary falls across the snow. The Raven holds its own in that company. I do not write that line often.

Grief-horror is a crowded room. Most of what fills it grabs for shock. McCauley reaches for something harder. She makes you understand the man, step by frozen step. By the end you are in the crypt beside him, the cold at your back, and the last thing you want to admit is how well you understand him.

The Raven by Susan McCauley

As illness tightens its grip, something darker begins to stir.

England, 1665. As plague ravages London and fear spreads north to York, Martin Blake, a humble cobbler, struggles to protect his family through a bitter, death-shadowed winter. When the parish rector, his wife’s domineering uncle, forces orphaned children from London into their already meager home, Martin’s fragile world begins to unravel.

Grief, illness, and the weight of buried sins close in. Ravens gather. Martin’s reason begins to slip. Whispers spread—of misused alms, of spirits that roam at night, of faith twisted into something monstrous. As snow blankets the land and the dead lie unburied, Martin must confront a chilling truth: is he haunted by guilt, or by something far more sinister?

A gothic tale of illness, obsession, and the perilous border between loyalty and madness.

​Susan (Basso) McCauley is a screenwriter and award-winning author of books for children, teens, and adults. Susan fell in love with writing, theater, and film when she was eight-years-old. That passion inspired her to receive a B.A. in Radio-Television with a minor in Theater from the University of Houston, an M.F.A. in Professional Writing from the University of Southern California (USC), and a M.A. in Text & Performance from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) and King’s College in London. Susan also studied acting at Playhouse West with Robert Carnegie and Jeff Goldblum (Wicked, Jurassic Park, Independence Day) in Los Angeles.

While in London, her stage adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s “The Nose” was performed at the Art’s George Bernard Shaw Theatre; and, scenes from her play The Prisoner: Princess Elizabeth were performed under the watchful eye of the Tower Historian and Beefeaters at HMS Tower of London. It was in London that Susan was reminded of her love of fiction, and the first seeds of what was to become her Ghost Hunters novel series were planted in her mind.

Since returning to the U.S., Susan has had several short stories published in various anthologies, and her screen adaptation of “The Cask” was made into an award-winning short film. Susan now has nine novels, one novella, and one picture book in publication, many of which have appeared on the Horror Writers Association (HWA) list of Recommended Works. Additionally, Susan’s exciting middle grade Ghost Hunters series has won numerous awards and is in development for television. Her forthcoming gothic horror novel, The Raven (September 2026), is also in development for film. 

In addition to writing, Susan loves travel, photography, animals, and staying fit (she’s a 2nd degree black belt in taekwondo.)

You can find out more about Susan and her books by visiting her website: https://www.sbmccauley.com/

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