Subscribe to The Spectator in our Black Friday Flash Sale and you'll get 12 weeks of the magazine, along with full access to all of our online content, for just £12. Not only that, but we'll also send you a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label Whiskey worth £30 on the shops, absolutely free.

Hurry though, this ridiculously good offer, ends on the 1st of December.

Go to www.com.com.uk-Frily Friday.

Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator.

This week I'm welcoming to my guest, the writer Leon Craig. Her first novel, The Decadence, is a rare and delightful thing, an old-fashioned thing in some ways.

It's a haunted house story, but with kind of a modern twist. Leon, welcome. Can you start by sort of explaining for the listeners a bit what the setup of the decadence is? Yes. Hello, Sam. Thank you so much for having me. I'm delighted to hear the decades refer to as old-fashioned. I think that might be the first time, but it will

become clearer why that's fun in a moment. So it's about six disaffected millennials who go on an

extremely illegal pandemic holiday to a country house in order to basically go on a quite long bender.

What they don't realize in the midst of cheating on each other

and doing almost every substance under the sun

is that the house is incredibly haunted

and by the time they do realise this, it's too late.

And you say in your afterwards

that you've been trying to write this novel

for like a decade and a half

or two decades or something.

What was it about it that kind of gripped you and wouldn't let go?

And why does it take so long to sort of find your way into it?

So I think at the heart of the novel is betrayal and power and questions about, you know, who is really innocent. If anyone

really is, I'm not entirely convinced that they are. And trying to formulate those questions

is not an easy thing. It's particularly not an easy thing to do as you're kind of growing up

alongside those questions

...