Gothic novels

Review: “No One Will Know”

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★★★

Eve Sylvester thinks that after meeting her lover’s family in Australia she’s going to be sailing around the world with the man of her dreams. Then a tragic accident turns her life inside out. It leaves her disoriented, broke, alone, basically friendless and this shocking development makes her feel nothing good can ever happen to her again.

The tide seems to turn though, dramatically. Despite being completely unqualified, she’s offered a job as a nanny and ends up on a small island off the coast of Tasmania employed by a very wealthy young couple of shipping magnates. As you’d expect from the title, the job that seems to be too good to be true turns out to be a nightmare.

Complete with a Mrs. Danvers figure, this is another update of the popular Gothic formula dating back to Ann Radcliffe: a damsel in distress has to navigate the mysteries of a remote castle or mansion. In this case, the dwelling comes with a lovely summerhouse. And a yacht. 

While you expect twists and turns in a novel of suspense like No One Will Know, except for the very last one they’re undercut because the heroine is so clueless and naive.  At pretty much every turn, Eve misreads people and situations, and finds herself trapped in misery, lies, threatened with mortal danger.  Most surprising of all, though, is that Eve makes an almost catastrophic mistake when taking a boat out to sea even though she’s supposed to be a fairly seasoned sailor.

Right after that, the book’s momentum takes a massive hit.  The structure changes radically: we switch point of view to someone far less interesting than Eve and plunge into some very long flashbacks.  A secret that has been lurking at the edge of the narrative is explained and it’s not dramatic enough. But that’s just the appetizer for a bigger, more horrible secret that reveals just how despicable and sociopathic the people around Eve really are.  Not quite the gang in Rosemary’s Baby, but close enough.

The author is at her best when she describes the forlorn island and the waters around it, and when she writes about the powerful bond between mothers and their babies. In the end, this novel is both horrifying and heart-warming, and that’s not an easy mix to pull off.

Lev Raphael reviewed crime fiction at The Detroit Free Press for many years. He has taught mystery and suspense fiction at Michigan State University and  mystery writing at numerous writers’ conferences. His suspense novel Assault With a Deadly Lie was a Midwest Book Award nominee.

 

 

 

 

Review: Goth Girl, Interrupted

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★★★★

Agnes Corey isn’t your typical New York editorial assistant.  She hasn’t earned a degree in publishing, didn’t go to a ritzy college, and her past is “a story of abandonment, foster homes, petty crimes, and state institutions.”

She works at a near-bankrupt Manhattan legacy publisher that hasn’t had a best seller since the early 1990s and is likely to be swallowed up by a conglomerate. That might explain why even as a probationary hire, she’s grossly underpaid, earning much less than the current real-life average salary for her job.

Corey is troubled, vulnerable, poor, plagued by nightmares and memories of her mentally ill mother. Adding to the misery is being so broke she can only afford to live in a crummy hostel until luck and daring take charge of her life. She’s hired to help a famous, reclusive author of a very Gothic novel adored by millions, the novel that put her publishing house on the map. Fans have been ravenous for more content from author Veronica St. Clair, a sequel to be exact, because the first book had an ambiguous ending.

The mansion Corey comes to at night and in the rain (of course!) is like every castle or mansion from Anne Radcliffe through the Brontës to Shirley Jackson and beyond: eerie, overwhelming, oozing menace and mystery. Even better, it was once a mental institution and like Shirley Jackson’s Hill House, it seems a bit mad itself.

The author name checks plenty of celebrated Gothic works, and the novelist’s name even echoes the heroine of The Mysteries of Udolpho, Emily St. Aubert.  Goodman deftly deploys time-tested Gothic tropes: scary scenery, shadows, the damsel in distress, exploring dark corners, paranoia, claustrophobia, imagined phantoms, dreadful weather, real and misplaced fears–and of course the house that seems like a brooding, malevolent being.

The author can even make the West Village in Manhattan seem creepy and mysterious–at least at night.  She also writes good satire of the publishing business while giving it the ironic hipster appeal of vinyl and flip phones.

As the novel develops, Corey’s nightmares are so intense that they bleed into her everyday reality, in part because she’s a sleep walker. When she starts taking dictation from the reclusive author whose life might echo the storyline of the original best seller, is that fact or fiction?  Is she a remotely reliable narrator?  If she is, can we trust Veronica St. Clair?  The novel more and more feels like a Russian nesting doll as stories keep appearing within other stories.

Readers may either be fascinated or thrown by the way the book slowly drifts into a tale of drugs and Goths in New York whose soundtrack could easily be Lou Reed’s Street Hassle. And the focus on Corey’s dreams can sometimes feel excessive.  For a deeper immersion in the Gothic style, I highly recommend Sarah Perry’s brilliant, beautifully-written novel Melmoth which revisits the 1820 novel Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Robert Maturin and turns it inside out.

Lev Raphael spent his senior year of college reading all the classic Gothic novelists, some of them in period editions.  The author of twenty-seven books in genres from memoir to mystery, he has reviewed books for The Detroit Free Press, The Washington Post and other outlets. His most recently published short story “Lost in London” is a Gothic ghost tale.

Sarah Perry’s Amazing Melmoth

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In Sarah Perry’s second novel, Melmoth, Helen Franklin is a bland, depressed English translator in her 40s who lives and works in Prague but doesn’t think much of its fabled baroque beauty.  In fact, she has contempt for it. She lives a severely monastic life, denies herself pleasure so profoundly that she rents a room from a nosy, obnoxious elderly woman who mocks her and whom she herself finds gross and grotesque.

Despite her knowledge of German and Czech, which might expand her interests and social life, Franklin’s life in Prague is stupefyingly dull as she works on boring projects like translating technical manuals.  And then something dazzling changes everything.  It’s a manuscript containing a handful of bizarre and even horrific stories, given to her by one of her only Czech friends who seems shattered by having read it. 

Franklin reads the manuscript in pieces and begins to be drawn into its dark labyrinth.  Is she insane?  Is what she experiences really happening or has her undisclosed past finally caught up with her?  And what’s led her to live such a claustrophobic, self-denying life in a city that seems to offer joy, pleasure, and even simple amusement at every turn?

The stories are narratives of encounters with “Melmoth the Witness,” a woman invariably dressed in mourner’s black who wanders the Earth lonely, barefoot, stalking people who have either sunk into despair, done something terrible–or both.  Melmoth’s own crime that led to her being cursed was to deny what other women saw when the stone was rolled away from the tomb of Jesus.  Since that time, she’s been the ghostly, seductive epitome of suffering and pain, inexorably drawn to misery in many forms, leaving bloody footprints wherever she roams.

All the stories, ranging across countries and centuries, focus on human misery and criminality–but this isn’t a crime novel per se.  It’s a new take on the Gothic. You don’t have to know the classic novels by Ann Radcliffe, “Monk” Lewis or Charles Maturin (who’s name checked here) to appreciate the stunning achievement.  

But if you have, you’ll be even more gobsmacked by the dazzling and disturbing mix of the two original strands of Gothic.  There’s Terror Gothic: Is Franklin being followed?  Is someone about to do her harm?  What is the dark secret that torments her? 

And then there’s Horror Gothic in many forms, including a ghastly scene that feels like an homage to Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.  Melmoth herself is horrifying, given that everything about her seems both dead and alive at the same time.  She’s a ghost, a zombie, a vampire of sorts, a shape shifter.

Melmoth is a surprisingly short novel overflowing with color, texture, and stories, stories, stories.  The book’s narrator speaks to you directly in a voice that will not be denied, and don’t be surprised if Melmoth makes you wonder if someone is spying on you–with evil intent.

Lev Raphael is the author of 27 books in many genres, has taught creative writing at Michigan State University, and currently edits and coaches writers at writewitoutborders.com.