Review 2338: My Death

The unnamed narrator of My Death is a novelist who has been unable to write since her husband died a year ago. She has been isolated in a house in the west of Scotland. She decides to try biography instead and chooses the figure of Helen Ralston, whose accomplishments as an artist and writer were overshadowed by her tumultuous affair with her mentor, W. E. Logan, another artist.

When she begins to look into the subject, she finds that all of Ralston’s books are out of print but Logan’s are not. However, Ralston is in her 90s and eager to meet her and share her journals and photos. The narrator is struck with unease, however, when she sees a painting by Ralston entitled My Death, a supposed landscape of an island that is really a painting of the artist’s most intimate parts. As she continues her research, she keeps finding odd echoes of her own life.

This novella is described as gothic, but I wouldn’t exactly call it that, although it is unsettling and weird. Important to Tuttle is the theme of, as the Introduction by Amy Gentry puts it, “the erasure of women’s authorship by men.” That is certainly at work here, as she based some of the details of Ralson’s life on that of Laura Riding, an American poet and lover of Robert Graves, who accused Graves of stealing material.

This is an involving story that at first seems straightforward but gets odder and odder. I found it fascinating. Tuttle is in general a science fiction writer, but despite that I may look for more by her.

I received this book from the publishers in exchange for a free and fair review.

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Review 2251: #1962 Club! We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Twice a year, Simon of Stuck in a Book and Kaggsy of Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings sponsor a Read the Year club, for which they randomly pick a year in the first three-quarters of the 20th century, and participants select books published during that year to read. This time, the year is 1962, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle is my first selection for the club.

However, as usual, I have already posted reviews for three other books published in 1962:

• The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side by Agatha Christie
• The Moon-Spinners by Mary Stewart
• The Nonesuch by Georgette Heyer

We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a true modern gothic novel (or maybe novella—it’s very short), moving gradually but compellingly to reveal its secrets. Mary Catherine Blackwood lives with her sister Constance and their Uncle Julian in the family home, isolated from the rest of the village. We first meet Mary Catherine on one of her biweekly trips to the village for food, where she carefully plots her course to try to avoid people. However, she is mocked by the villagers, both young and old.

Slowly, we learn the first secret—that six years ago when Mary Catherine was twelve, most of her family was poisoned. Mary Catherine survived because she had been sent to bed without supper, Constance because she seldom used sugar, which had arsenic in it; Uncle Julian ate very little, so he survived but has since been feeble and muddled. Constance was tried for the crime but found not guilty. Ever since then, the girls have avoided other people.

Mary Catherine’s narrative hints that things are going to change. First, Helen Clarke arrives for tea, as she does once a week, but she brings along a friend, and Constance seems to be responding to her suggestion that she get out more. Mary Catherine worries about this, for she is very protective of Constance. Then Cousin Charles arrives. Naïve Constance accepts him, but Mary Catherine thinks he’s a bad one.

Mary Catherine is a dreamy girl who has strange compulsions and rituals, but one by one, Charles dismantles her protections around their property. We can see that the sisters are soon to be shaken from their oddly comfortable existence.

Jackson was a master at evoking an atmosphere. I think only her The Haunting of Hill House surpasses this one in power.

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Review 2183: The Leviathan

In 1703, someone has awakened, someone Thomas Treadwater has been watching over for 60 years.

In 1643, Thomas is on leave from the Parliamentary army, on his way home because of an urgent summons by his sister Esther. When he arrives home, he finds many of his father’s sheep dead and his father felled by an apoplectic fit.

Thomas is disturbed to find that Esther has incriminated a servant girl, Chrissa Moore, for witchcraft, blaming her for the state of their father and claiming that the girl has had relations with him. Worse, he finds that Joan, a long-time servant, is also incriminated. Almost immediately after Thomas arrives, Rutherford, an officer of the court, arrives to escort Esther to make a statement, and Thomas finds that Joan and her mother have been arrested as well as Chrissa, who is refusing to speak.

Esther goes down to the jail to see Joan but says she and her mother wouldn’t speak to her. When Thomas goes down to the jail, Chrissa asks him to speak to Lucy Bennett in Norwich. Then he discovers that Joan and her mother are dead, poisoned by hemlock.

Although I figured out part of what was going on almost immediately, thus begins a truly gothic story that involves an ancient legend, a family secret, and the poet John Milton. It’s full of adventure and is rivetting.

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Review 2119: The House of Footsteps

Simon Christie, in his brand new role as an art cataloger, takes his first job for a well-known auction house. He is supposed to evaluate the famous Mortlake collection, rumored to perhaps have even a Da Vinci.

When he arrives at the small village near the Mortlake house, Thistlecrook, he hears rumors about the unpredictable owner, Victor Mortlake, and about a history of violence on the property and deaths in the lake.

Victor Mortlake is unpredictable and the famous art collection is horrifying—images of ghastly acts of violence. Still, because of Simon’s ingratiating behavior, Mortlake seems to believe Simon understands something that he doesn’t.

Then Simon meets Amy in the library, an unexplained and unacknowledged presence in the house. Who is she? And of course he hears footsteps in the house at night.

This novel, set in the mid-1920s, seemed much like a Victorian gothic. I thought it would be the perfect book for me, but it was slow moving and hard to stick with. It is written mostly with description rather than dialogue, much like a Victorian novel. Further, by the end of the novel I still wasn’t quite sure what was going on.

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Review 2113: The Clockwork Girl

I liked Mazzola’s The Story Keeper well enough to try another book by her. This one looked interesting.

In 18th century Paris, Madeleine was forced into prostitution at a young age by her mother and so badly scarred by a customer that she now works in the brothel as a maid. She is determined to escape with her nephew, which is one reason she reluctantly agrees to spy for the police on the household of Dr. Reinhart. She is supposed to find out what he is working on, but once installed there, she finds it difficult to learn anything. Something about Reinhart seems off, but he locks up his secrets. However, his interest is in anatomy and he makes elaborate wind-up animals.

A second narrator, Véronique, is Reinhart’s daughter, newly returned from being raised in a convent. Her father has promised to train her in his work, but time passes and he works only with Doctor LeFevre on some project for the King.

Madeleine hears rumors that children are disappearing off the streets and worries about her nephew.

A third narrator is Madame de Pompadour, who is afraid she is losing the King’s affection and worried about what he is up to.

This novel is fast-paced and eventually gets very creepy, but there are some unlikely aspects about it, especially how neatly everything is resolved. Still, it certainly kept my attention.

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Review 2025: Mexican Gothic

It’s 1950 Mexico City. Noemí Taboada is a university student, but mostly she’s a socialite from a wealthy family aiming to have as much fun as possible.

Noemí’s father has received a disturbing letter from her cousin Catalina, who recently married a man no one knows very well. It sounds like Catalina is mentally disturbed. So, he asks Noemí to visit Catalina to find out what’s going on.

Catalina has married Virgil Doyle, the son of silver mine owners originally from England. But the silver has run out, and Noemí finds High Place a crumbling Victorian mansion. The family is not welcoming, and they impose a lot of rules, including only infrequent visits to Catalina. Catalina herself seems at first simply ill—she has tuberculosis—but later babbles about something listening, something in the walls.

Although the youngest son of the family, Francis, is friendly and helps her out, the rest of the family remains cold. Noemí herself begins having bizarre dreams.

Some readers may have a problem with how slowly this novel gets going, because the only thing that happens for quite a while is these dreams, but eventually the action picks up. Other readers have complained at the unlikelihood of the secrets revealed. That bothered me at first, but then I thought it was in the spirit of the original gothic novels. I decided it wasn’t any less likely than the notion of vampires or zombies and in these days a lot more original.

The novel is atmospheric, the heroine feisty, the ending quite suspenseful. It delivers what it promises.

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Review 1880: The Castle of Otranto

I first read The Castle of Otranto too long ago as assignment for high school and thought it was very silly. However, it was the first gothic novel, written in 1764, and led the way toward a fascination with Gothic culture in a country littered with ruined Gothic churches and abbeys as a result of the so-called “Bloodless Revolution.” So, I put it on my Classics Club list to see what I think about it now.

Well, it’s a silly book. It is represented in the Preface as a manuscript written sometime between 1095 and 1243. Practically the first thing that happens in it is that Conrad, the son of Manfred, prince of Otranto, has a gigantic helmet fall on him out of nowhere and crush him to death on the day he is to be betrothed to Isabella, the Marquiz of Vincenza’s daughter. This is the first supernatural event in a very short book that includes walking portraits, statues crying tears of blood, and various enormous body parts appearing in the castle.

Why? It appears that Manfred’s grandfather took the castle unlawfully, and the legend is that his family may hold it until its real owner grows too large to inhabit it. Hence, the enormous body parts.

This novel exhibits all the hallmarks of the subsequent gothic novels, many of which aren’t that palatable to modern readers—overblown speeches, submissive and virtuous women (Manfred’s wife even being so submissive as to agree to her own divorce), a nearly insane villain in Manfred, a hero in disguise, a lot of fainting, and supernatural events.

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Review 1863: Not the End of the World

I was fairly sure I had read everything by Kate Atkinson, but I couldn’t remember Not the End of the World. So, I decided to revisit it.

This collection of stories is a relatively early book. Some of the stories are apocalyptic or macabre, some have an element of magical realism, some are whimsical, some capture a moment in ordinary life. Although the stories stand alone, some of them are linked by recurring characters or by more subtle means. I suspect, if you were very attentive, you could find many links. For example, in the first story, “Charlene and Trudi Go Shopping,” the two have a conversation about wedding favors that is repeated in “Wedding Favors” between two different characters. And is the accident driven past by a character in one story the one that kills another character in another story?

Atkinson’s prose is, as always, witty and vivid. I found a few of the characters, like the battling teenage siblings in “Dissonance,” irritating but realistic. On the other hand, a boy who looks like a fish turns out to be the son of Triton. A bold girl removes a cloak from an old lady and the old lady disintegrates. A dead woman tries to get back her life. An adopted alley cat grows bigger and bigger and bigger.

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Review 1860: Luckenbooth

I just loved Jenni Fagan’s other books, so I was expecting a lot from Luckenbooth. Unfortunately, it didn’t quite deliver.

The devil’s daughter launches herself off the island where she was born, using her own coffin for a boat. She arrives at a tenement in Edinburgh to take on the function her father has sold her for, to be the surrogate mother for Mr. Uldam’s child with his fiancée Elise.

This is the first of nine story threads that proceed up the nine floors of 10 Luckenbooth Close, a building of secrets and horrors. The novel has a specific structure. It is split into thirds, with each third featuring the tales of residents on three floors of the building, and each thread advancing a decade in time, beginning in 1910. On the second floor, a transgender woman attends a transgressive party in 1928. On the third floor, a black Southern American works in the bone library of a veterinary school in 1939, and so on. The building hides some horrors that are finally revealed in 1999, when Dot, who is squatting in the derelict building, rips out the walls of the lower floors. But these secrets are no big surprise.

The stories are written in modern vernacular, which I suppose is a stylistic choice, but found it grating, especially for Levi’s letters to his brother. He’s the black American from Louisiana, and besides not sounding 1939ish, he doesn’t sound American, he doesn’t sound black, and he definitely doesn’t sound Southern. In fact, the more I think about it, I feel this choice to use modern vernacular indicates a general attitude of laziness. As an example, Levi chooses to explain things to his brother that his brother would know—like the building being called tenement, as if the U. S. hasn’t had tenements for hundreds of years. In fact, Levi is unbelievably naïve for a black man from the American South. The rich get everything while the poor get nothing? What a surprise!

Another example is that for a gothic novel that is supposed to convey the dark history of Edinburgh, there is an amazing lack of a sense of place (except for in the building) until 1999. Does this suggest that the author thus evaded any research into the appearance of Edinburgh in the past?

I can go on about this, but I just want to bring up a few more things. One is the polemic passages in the novel. There are long passages of ranting about such subjects as the treatment of the poor or women. I would have thought these ideas could have been worked in differently.

Next, I don’t know anything about William S. Burroughs, for example, whether he believed what Fagan has him say. All I know is, after the first few paragraphs when he started talking, I started flipping pages.

Finally, there is a gangster standoff in 1977 where what is said is so unlikely that I could barely stand it. It seems like it might have been a juvenile idea of a “cool” scene.

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Review 1851: The House of Whispers

Hester Why travels to the Cornish coast to take up a position as a lady’s maid. Right away, we know something is wrong, because Hester is traveling under an assumed name and is drinking. When she arrives at Morvoren House, it seems a strange household. The mistress, Louise Pinecroft, is a frail woman who hardly speaks and refuses to leave a drawing room full of china, even though the room is freezing. Aside from an adopted daughter who, although adult, is treated like a child, there are only servants, including Creeda, a disturbing woman who is obsessed with fairies.

Forty years earlier, Louise Pinecroft and her father arrive at Morvoren House. Dr. Pinecroft has purchased the house because it sits above some caves on a beach. He has a theory that clean, damp sea air could cure consumptives, so he has arranged for some consumptive convicts to live in huts built in the caves below the house. Neither Louise nor her father is thinking very clearly, because their entire family recently died of consumption, after which Dr. Pinecroft lost all his patients because he couldn’t save his family.

This gothic novel is set in two unnamed periods, most likely in the 19th century. It is about two women whose need to be needed basically shipwrecks their lives. It is fairly creepy, although I thought the ending was kind of all over the place. Still, Purcell knows how to write a page-turner.

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