Liverpool is considered to be one of the most haunted cities in the UK, so it’s no surprise that I set my series of Gothic Horror novels right here in the city’s industrial past.
In The Spider, the Bryant family moved into number 5 Percy Street which is a real place situated in the Georgian Quarter of Liverpool. You can visit the Georgian Quarter today (but please don’t bother anyone at number 5 because I’ve completely made the haunting up!) At the time that the novel is set, this house will have been around 60 years old and sought after. This part of Liverpool was home to some of the city’s architects and politicians as well as bankers and other wealthy merchants.
The Georgian Quarter was the perfect place to set The Spider, a Gothic mystery novel set in Victorian Liverpool.
Gothic horror usually involves a crumbling mansion somewhere out in the sticks, or an old castle in one of the home counties. I wanted to do it differently. I decided to bring the Gothic sense of claustrophobic dread to the heart of Victorian Liverpool. There are no lords or ladies… or mysterious counts. Just a Victorian family who have just moved from a working class life in West Derby to middle class in the heart of Liverpool.
Liverpool, 1892
Finding his fortune in Australia, John Bryant returns to his wife and child in England, moving them into number 5, Percy Street. Anxious to start a new life, Frances Bryant finds herself in the clutches of a malevolent presence within the house, unable to escape it.
When paranormal investigator Daniel Muldoon is called to investigate the case, he soon discovers the haunting of number 5 is just the beginning of the horror that will unfold.
Lives hang in the balance, for some it is already too late. Muldoon must compete in a race against time to save those caught in a spider’s web.
The Spider is set in Liverpool because it’s a haunted house book. I also felt the need to explore the city’s longstanding culture of the paranormal.
Liverpool has always been synonymous with ghosts, and those who grew up here were fed a diet of Tom Slemen’s Haunted Liverpool books as well as the works of Ramsay Campbell and Clive Barker. When I started writing The Spider in 2024, ghosts were always going to happen: Liverpool is a great place for some paranormal goings on. With the old docks and the old buildings everywhere you look, it’s hard not to hear a ghost story everywhere you go.
Not only is The Spider about a haunted house in Liverpool but it also features the supposedly haunted Adelphi Hotel. I couldn’t not put it in!
“Well, you can wear that one this week when I take you for dinner,” he said, leaving the room. “Thursday night at the Adelphi.”
Frances smiled and placed the gown back into the wardrobe delicately. As she pushed the skirt back in, she noticed that it smelled different, with a whiff of a fragrance that she didn’t recognise at first: lavender. Realising that it had been so long since she had had new clothes, she wondered if the latest fashion was to have them made already perfumed. She looked down at her old, dull, woollen travelling gown and shrugged the notion off.
Frances and John Bryant have dinner at the Adelphi hotel.
“I promise you, I’m coming back.” He reached out to touch her hand.
“Excuse me for a moment.” She lifted herself from the chair and sailed out into the foyer, looking for the W.C. The foyer was crowded with dinner guests and tourists loitering and smoking on the sofas. She brushed past them and looked across at a mirror on the wall.
Her heart stopped. In the foreground of the reflection, she saw a chestnut-haired woman, slightly taller than she was, wearing the same red dress. Her scarlet shape provided a stark contrast with the smattering of black and white clad gentlemen in the room behind her. With an expressionless gaze, she looked at Frances, as though studying her for a minute. Frances inhaled a deep breath and held it. The brunette’s expression transformed from a look of indifference to sheer terror, and with her mouth rounded and open wide, she let out a piercing scream, shattering the mirror into a thousand pieces. Frances shielded herself from the shards and rolled to the floor.
The lobby of the Adelphi is most definitely haunted in The Spider.
Where does Occult Detective Daniel Muldoon come in? Does he only deal with hauntings in Liverpool?
No. Daniel Muldoon is a psychic detective with his own demons. He’s also a demonologist. Muldoon did some work at the Vatican after running away from his home in Holywood, Northern Ireland. Muldoon is quite mysterious about his past and doesn’t go into detail about how he has the abilities he does. He’s just “a bit witchy” as Chief Inspector Andrew Gill likes to call him. Muldoon assists the Liverpool City Police with their strangest cases. We’re introduced to his work in The Spider, when he reluctantly agrees to attend:
“Just showing you the woman because she doesn’t look like that at the moment.”
“What happened to her?”
“That’s for you to find out. Mrs Mckinnon brought these in with her statement. The men at the desk weren’t very kind to the old lady, naturally, what with her saying her mistress is possessed and all, but she knows my housekeeper and managed to get it all to me. I don’t deal in the supernatural, but you do. I promised I’d send someone.”
Muldoon leaned back with a furrowed brow, closing the file. “This all seems a bit… domestic, don’t you think?”
Gill said nothing. He puffed on his pipe, glaring at the Irishman. Muldoon sighed. “Where’s this woman then?” he asked, realising this was not optional.
I wanted Liverpool to have its own Occult Detective; its own Sherlock Holmes (but less arrogant), its own Professor Van Helsing, John Constantine or Kinderman.
Muldoon is the perfect character to deal with the supernatural goings on in Victorian Liverpool.
The Spider is a Gothic ghost story/Victorian crime thriller set in Liverpool. It is Hanna Delaney’s second novel and is the first in the series of Muldoon Mysteries; novels set in a fictional supernatural Liverpool where the hidden battle between good and evil takes place under the noses of its everyday residents. Readers of The Haunting Of Hill House and The Shining will enjoy the novel’s supernatural suspense, while fans of Sherlock Holmes and Ashes To Ashes will enjoy the Victorian detective novel aspect as well as the dark, gritty humour throughout.
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