It’s not for nothing that Julia Leigh’s sophomore effort is subtitled “a story.” At 121 pages, Disquiet is shorter than your average novel, but Leigh’s fundamental approach, rather than her book’s size, is what earns the label: She is deliberately weaving a tale, with all the formal constraints this implies.

In this spooky yarn halfway between Daphne du Maurier and Bruno Bettelheim, the Australian-born author carefully doles out gothic archetypes: a grand, slightly battered château in the French countryside; a bruised mother and her two small children, fleeing an unnamed but ominous trauma; a sister-in-law who can’t let go of her stillborn baby; a leathery matriarch and her retinue of obedient servants. The steadfastly neutral tone is the book’s greatest asset: The mother is referred to in dialog as Olivia, but mostly she’s just “the woman,” while the dead infant is “the bundle,” carefully kept in a freezer. As far as explorations of maternity go, this dry nightmare of a book isn’t going to land on any mommy group’s reading list.

And yet.…Alas, why is there so often a yet with books you so want to like? To Leigh’s credit, she opts for cool, almost flat detachment rather than overblown gothica, but Disquiet just ends up feeling like a class assignment: “Deploy clichés to show you know basic fairy-tale tropes but then refrain from actually doing anything with them.” Uncoincidentally perhaps, Leigh teaches creative writing at Barnard.) Virtuosic but empty, the book leaves no lasting impression: It just ends, and poof, it’s gone. Sometimes less is more, and sometimes it’s just less.

Buy Disquiet now on BN.com