Naomi's Room

Naomi's Room is a horror novel by the Northern Irish writer Jonathan Aycliffe, published in 1991. It is told in the first person and recounts the events from the perspective of a man looking back on them years later.

Charles Hillenbrand teaches at Pembroke College and lives in Cambridge with his wife Laura, who gave up her job at the Fitzwilliam Museum when their daughter Naomi was born. On Christmas Eve 1970 he takes the four-year-old to London for the day by train, and she vanishes in a shop. The novel follows the years of searching that follow and the small, wrong details that accumulate around the family, and it does not leave the ordinary world to do its work: the horror arrives through the police, the press and the household rather than through a monster. Aycliffe writes in a restrained voice that keeps the account plausible for as long as possible, which is what the book is remembered for.

The novel was well received on publication and has been reprinted since, and Aycliffe, a pseudonym of the writer Denis MacEoin, published several further ghost stories in the same manner.