Journalists tend to get a bad rap in suspense fiction, portrayed as stubborn interlopers dogging the detectives or rubberneckers harassing crime victims. So it’s always refreshing to read a thriller that foregrounds storytellers and their particular dilemmas, such as Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects, Rebecca Makkai’s I Have Some Questions for You and now Coram House, the debut from Burlington-area author Bailey Seybolt.
The novel’s narrator is a disgraced true crime writer named Alex Kelley. And the story with which she hopes to redeem herself is ripped from Vermont headlines: the dark legacy of a former orphanage where generations of children were abused.
Seybolt clarifies the connection between her fictional Coram House and Burlington’s real-life St. Joseph’s Catholic Orphanage in an author’s note. Locals will recognize the Rock Point location and the outlines of the story: the victims’ lawsuits that led to a settlement decades after the orphanage’s closure, the eventual transformation of the building into an apartment complex and the haunting but still unsubstantiated allegations that the nuns murdered children in their care.
Among the former St. Joseph’s residents who made such allegations was a certain Sally Dale. In the fictional rendering of Coram House, a girl named Sarah Dale tells a different but likewise harrowing tale, which serves as prologue to the main narrative. In 1968, Sarah watches from a hilltop as a nun and a fellow resident toss a boy into the lake for a “swimming lesson.” The boy is never seen again.
In the novel’s present day, Alex’s fascination with Coram House grows as she does research for a book about the case, reading the depositions of Sarah and other survivors. In her previous book, she made hasty conclusions that derailed her career. So now she returns to basics, relying on her “ability to find the story within a mess of historical documents.”
Having lost her husband three years earlier, Alex feels the weight of the survivors’ unresolved trauma. But she’s constrained by her ghostwriting contract with the lawyer who represented the former Coram House residents in the late ’80s, and he doesn’t share her faith that the darker allegations hold water. Her potential star witness, Sarah, died years ago. Moreover, the local police seem determined to foil and belittle Alex — even after she discovers a fresh corpse at Rock Point that turns out to be linked to Coram House.
Starting from this strong premise, Seybolt takes her plot through twists and turns that should satisfy thriller fans, all leading to an unpredictable but not outlandish conclusion. Alex narrates most of the novel in first-person present tense, lending the hectic quality of her obsession to the novel as a whole. “There have been times in my life where I could actually feel it — that warm seeping sensation as the story takes form,” she tells us. “Like the warmth that spreads through your body after that first drink.”
That metaphor is in line with the water imagery that pervades the book, anchored by the central setting of frozen Lake Champlain. But Alex also drinks literally — and copiously — as she pores over documents in her Old North End apartment. She jogs with ruthless abandon, takes stupid risks (by her own admission), muses on good and evil and the persistence of memory, and bugs a handsome cop so often that the reader may start feeling sorry for him. In short, she’s an all-too-familiar type of dysfunctional thriller protagonist, the sort of character who unironically calls herself “broken.”
Writing suspense fiction tends to be a balancing act between the vertiginous nihilism of noir — which questions everything from social institutions to the protagonist’s integrity — and the comforting certainties of genre tropes. Coram House touches on vexing ambiguities whenever it delves into the history of the orphanage — for instance, in its portrait of a nun who might be a savior, a murderer or both.
But by filtering that history through Alex, who isn’t “unreliable” so much as just messy, Seybold ultimately embraces the safety of convention. While our narrator offers deft and colorful descriptions of places and people involved in the case, her internal voice tends toward the boilerplate: “[T]he alarm in my brain is screaming now. Something is wrong.”
The power of good journalism — and good fiction — is to bring coherence to the seeming disorder of reality, and Coram House does satisfy in that department. As the handsome cop scolds Alex, “Motive is just a story. It doesn’t matter if you can prove someone committed a crime.” But we never doubt that by reassembling the pieces of the Coram House puzzle, Alex will reassemble herself as well, using her storytelling talent to amplify voices too long silenced.
A 2018 BuzzFeed News story brought the St. Joseph’s case to national prominence and inspired a new investigation, much as we might imagine Alex’s book doing in Seybolt’s fictional world. In the novel, solving one of the mysteries of Coram House offers Alex and the reader a measure of catharsis. But in real life, that two-year inquiry demonstrated how elusive closure remains.
From Coram House
A man emerges from the trees, tugging a dog’s leash, just beside a sign that says ROCK POINT.
Then the trees are gone, replaced by a snowy field, dotted with headstones. I pass a brick church, dark and shuttered, too close to the road, which I assume is the church Stedsan mentioned. It feels out of proportion to the landscape around it with its huge neoclassical arches and high bell tower covered in flecks of white paint. More graveyard. Then, there it is.
Coram House.
Stedsan had included a grainy black-and-white photo in the materials he’d sent with my contract. But it’s different in person. For one thing, it’s much larger. Four stories of red brick topped with a slate roof, tiles smooth and shiny as the scales of a snake. The wooden front doors must be ten feet high. But even the building is dwarfed by the scale of the lake behind it.
I knew Lake Champlain was big — people call it the inland sea — but I’m still not prepared for the way water stretches forever in either direction, dotted by an occasional island for scale. The mountains on the other side are faint charcoal shapes etched in a gray sky. Unlike the bay just to the south, the water here isn’t frozen. White-capped waves churn the surface. A ferry plods into view, heading for the far shore.
Coram House looms. There’s no other way to describe it. This desolate graveyard with the sweeping view of the lake beyond like a promised land just out of reach. An island in the middle of a graveyard. How strange it would have been to be a child here.
Seybolt reads from the book on Saturday, May 17, 2 p.m., at the Norwich Bookstore.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Truth and Friction | Book review: Coram House, Bailey Seybolt”
This article appears in Apr 30 – May 6, 2025.
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