British Gothic, THE MYSTERIOUS AFFAIR AT CASTAWAY HOUSE, Stephanie Lam

The US publication of Stephanie Lam's debut novel, a modern-day Gothic set on the coast of England, is a perfect excuse to curl up on the couch with a cup of tea (or cocoa) and slip into another world -- one where mystery, desire, and suspense mingle, enhanced by startling moments of joy and discovery.

Like the instant of revelation of a flash of lightning, THE MYSTERIOUS AFFAIR AT CASTAWAY HOUSE opens through the eyes of a small girl in a dirty dress, overwhelmed with longing for the grand house up above the cliffs of the British seacoast. But the storm quickly moves forward, placing us at the dark and very grubby entrance to the once-grand home as of 1965, as 18-year-old Rosie Churchill struggles to find rent for her first home away from home ... as a boarder in this peculiar rooming house. She's not that far away geographically from the home where she grew up, and her mother keeps trying to reach her by phone. But Rosie's got her reasons for running away.

Quite a few chapters will pass in this satisfyingly chunky book (500 pages!), with its pulsing narrative that flips madly from 1965 to 1924 and back again, before Rosie gets specific about those reasons. The damage to this teen, though, opens her to a number of compassionate actions toward the old tramp arriving at Castaway House, insisting he's stayed there before.

Twists of romance, friendship, and the strangely dark threat of a "dishy" man with a white Jaguar, leaving her unwanted messages and gifts, keep the plot stormy and Rosie's life precarious. In some ways it's a relief, then, for her to try to take care of Dockie the tramp, and to press for details of the artist who lived in the house a generation earlier. This artist, Robert Carver, is the other set of eyes -- and stories -- that Lam provides, with his 1924 visit to the home of his school friend Alec. Robert can fake for the butler that he's used to hot and cold running water as the grand home provide. But the emotionally charged atmosphere between his friend Alec and Alec's new wife throws him completely off track:

Alec glanced towards the door, and then whispered in my ear, 'She hates me because I've seen through her.'

I turned to him. 'What on earth do you mean?'

'Shh.' He looked at the open door, and then, loudly, 'Let's go out. I've something to show you.'

'Show me?' I asked, heavy with food and wine and not particularly willing to leave the house. 'Is is important?'

He squeezed my hand. 'Life-threatening,' he growled.

Rosie's secrets, Robert's secrets -- and it's Castaway House (and the tramp Dockie) who will tie them together.

Shelve this one next to Laurie R. King's dark British exhumations of the Sherlock Holmes "continuation" or the archaeological mysteries of fellow Brit Elly Griffiths; there's a tang of English despair that also echoes into the Charles Todd series. And underneath, of course, the dire precedent of Jane Eyre. Storm, grand house, secrets -- oh yes, leave room on that bookshelf. This is Stephanie Lam's debut, and it's clear she'll have more good mysteries to follow. Website here; the book is published by Penguin and distributed via Trafalgar Square Publishing.

Brief Mention, THE RECKONING, Vol. 3 of Niceville Trilogy, Carsten Stroud

The finale of Carsten Stroud's Deep-South gothic Niceville Trilogy came out at the end of the summer, and I devoured it -- I really needed to see how Stroud would wrap up the series, and there was a lot of waiting involved, as publication of THE RECKONING was delayed more than a year.

The blurb that fronts the book is from Stephen King and says, "An authentic work of American genius." I'd be happier with something more pointed -- say, a 21st-century follow-up to Faulkner blended with the malice and darkness of T. Jefferson Parker at his most wicked. Carsten's task in the final book is to decide how much victory Nick Kavanaugh and his wife Kate Walker will be able to salvage from a part-paranormal burden of horror and evil that sucks its energy Niceville. I completely bought the interweaving of Native American and plantation and greed -- enough to ride with the paranormal parts pretty contentedly. (Who hasn't entered a place that said "creepy" and known it was rooted in the history of what took place there?) Carsten's blunt caper humor that interrupts the tension is a bit heavy-handed, but deliberately so (think Westlake or Zeltserman). The book's startling in its shifts from one mode to the other, though.

Don't read this one unless you plan to read all three. (Check out this review of book 2.) And keep your expectations for the finale modest -- I found the endings a bit too neat, and a bit too sweet, considering all the tension and darkness that had gone before. But it's definitely worth the read, and I wouldn't be surprised to see the trilogy take its place as an American classic.

Oh. Maybe that's what Stephen King meant? Yeah. That works for me.

Gothic Thriller: THE SEEKER, R. B. Chesterton (Carolyn Haines)

R. B. Chesterton is one of many pen names for Carolyn Haines -- and the author says she uses this one to probe the dark side of crime. THE SEEKER came out in 2014, and the softcover became available from Pegasus Crime a couple of weeks ago. So if you haven't tried this author under her noir-ish nom de plume yet, here's a good opportunity.

THE SEEKER is not just dark -- it's creepy. Aine Cahill's graduate studies at Boston's Brandeis University have taken her in two deliberately opposite directions: away from her Irish immigrant family and its "curse" that's migrated with the family to the South, erupting in Kentucky whiskey-running followed by a modern specialty in OxyContin ("hillbilly heroin"); and toward her great-great-great-great aunt Bonnie Cahill, who may have been Henry David Thoreau's lover during his retreat at Walden Pond.

But the further Aine reaches in on-site research in Massachusetts, the more strongly she finds her stay by Thoreau's pond haunted, by terrifying shreds of a past that she never dreamed of when she figured she'd track an unknown literary love affair. Two suitors also pursue her -- and even as she yields to the promised attention, a particularly nasty haunting occupies the same space and time:

No matter that Mischa was not in the cabin. She was in my head, and I had no clue how to exorcise her. Tomorrow, though, I would explore that option. There were plenty of Catholic churches in Concord, and through I'd left the pomp and ritual of the church far behind me, I knew where to find a priest.

I drifted into sleep, and found myself floating ... Struggle as I might, I couldn't break the thrall of the whale.

When no land was visible on the horizon, the whale surfaced. One blurry eye pinned me, and a rush of red blood shot from its blowhole. "You've met your destiny, Aine Cahill."

Think Nathaniel Hawthorne crossed with Steven King, and you're close to what R. B. Chesterton provides here. Keep the lights on, and the doors locked, while you read.

Vermont Gothic Thriller: THE SILENT GIRLS, Eric Rickstad

It's been a few years since Eric Rickstad's first book, Reap, garnered so much attention and introduced the Northeast Kingdom region of Vermont to a fresh set of readers. In THE SILENT GIRLS, Rickstad goes well beyond the ticking clock of suspense and the dangers of a thriller, to the very creepy aspects of a true Gothic. You know what I mean, if you've read Jennifer McMahon lately -- but subtract any chance of humor along the way.

A short first chapter, datelined Halloween, sixteen years earlier than the rest of the book, lays out a bloody and painful horror component at the start. But then THE SILENT GIRLS shifts apparent subgenres, becoming a classic police procedural, Frank Rath -- once a noted police detective in northern Vermont but working as a private investigator instead -- agrees to back up a local investigation into a missing teen. When Rath and his official colleagues find four more missing teens in the area over the past two years, the pattern hints at a serial killer. But the girls who are missing seem to have nothing in common: not body shape, grades, background. What could be the motive for their abductions? And is there a chance to save any of their lives? When one teen's body is found, the case takes on even more urgency.

Rath is a classic noir investigator, haunted by inner turmoil and guilt and a bad alcohol habit; his fellow investigators also show aspects that could make an employer uneasy, from anger to addiction of sorts. And what Rath has kept secret, especially from his adopted daughter, is erupting in unpredictable ways, thanks to an unexpected parole hearing for the killer who'd ended Rath's earlier career path.

Brace for dark, grim, and even horrific in this one -- an excellent interview with Rickstad (click here) tips a hat to the recent trends in Scandinavian crime writing, as well as to Stephen King. The book is smoothly written, tightly paced, with a taut plot that insists on quick reading. Clear the schedule (and keep the lights on).

A quick note to fellow Vermonters: Don't try to map the towns, roads, and counties that Rickstad lays out -- they're not where you'd expect. Pretend it's all new to you. Except, of course, for that grim stretch of late October and early November weather that's been called "locking time." That, and the cruelties of some Rickstad characters and plot twists, may feel familiar, after all.

When a Suspense Novel Is "Gothic": Vicki Delany and MORE THAN SORROW

This evening we welcome Canadian mystery author Vicki Delany to the Kingdom Books blog, to talk about a subgenre of mysteries that's getting fresh attention. Delany's newest book, MORE THAN SORROW, is a stand-alone (a break from her well-loved Constable Molly Smith series set in British Columbia  and her Yukon historicals), and while all the necessities of suspense are present -- a compelling protagonist, Hannah Manning, whose traumatic brain injury may have ended her career as an international journalist and war correspondent; threats against property and life; criminals with pathological approaches -- there's also a haunting strand of something less common, something airing a scent of evil out of Ontario's past.

But I'll let Vicki tell you about this approach:

The Modern Gothic Novel

By Vicki Delany

Sept 2012

Mention Gothic novels to ten people and you’ll get eleven different interpretations of what that means.

About all we seem to agree on is that it doesn’t mean a cozy or a comedy.

In the mid-to-late Twentieth Century the Gothic novel was the sort written by the likes of Victoria Holt or Mary Stewart that I grew up loving. Think of penniless governesses, crumbling Scottish castles, brooding, handsome aristocrats.  A dark secret in the family’s past. Always a dark secret.

Today the Gothic has been updated and the novels I love are sometimes called Modern Gothic, or British Gothic.

First, what they are NOT: No vampires.  No ghost hunters. Not horror. And probably not anyone you might call ‘goth’.

I go with Kate Morton’s definition.  In the afterword to her hugely successful novel The House at Riverton, Kate Morton describes the Gothic:  The haunting of the present by the past; the insistence of family secrets; return of the repressed; the centrality of inheritance (material, psychological and physical); haunted houses (particularly haunting of a metaphorical nature); suspicion concerning new technology and changing methods; the entrapment of women (whether physical or social) and associated claustrophobia; character doubling; the unreliability of memory and the partial nature of history; mysteries and the unseen; confessional narrative; and embedded texts. 

The Modern Gothic can be a ‘dark mystery’ but usually only in the psychological sense.  Michael Koryta calls his brilliant novel So Cold The River a Gothic and it is because it involves many of Morton’s definitions, but in it the paranormal presence is malevolent.  That is defiantly not always, in fact not usually, the case. 

 “Haunting of a metaphorical nature.” The modern Gothic may not even have a ghost story or paranormal aspect.  If there is a supernatural element it serves as a device to reveal the secrets of the past to the characters and the reader. 

  Kate Morton’s books, for example, have no paranormal elements.   In many books the suspected paranormal turns out to have a rational explanation after all, as in Carol Goodman’s Arcadia Falls.   In Peter Robinson’s Before the Poison the protagonist is ‘haunted’ not by a ghost but by the story of a woman who lived in his new house sixty years early and was accused of a dreadful crime, a crime that had to do with ‘the entrapment of women’.   If there is a paranormal element it is more likely to be benign or even helpful as in, for example, Katherine Howe’s The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane , rather than dripping evil.

Sometimes, that’s the question.  In my new novel More than Sorrow the protagonist, Hannah Manning, believes there’s something moving down in the dark damp root cellar. But Hannah is recovering from Traumatic Brain Injury caused by an IED explosion in Afghanistan.  So, both the reader and Hannah wonder, is there really a woman down there, or is she only the hallucinations of an injured mind?

 Which would be worse?

Contrary to popular opinion, Gothic doesn’t automatically mean romantic suspense. Romance is often a minor component, if there’s any at all, (e.g. The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton or Blood Harvest by S.J. Bolton.)  (Whereas in a Gothic romantic suspense novel, such as written by Susanna Kearsley, the romance is up front and prominent.)

The modern Gothic mystery novel can also be called a ‘psychological suspense’.  What defines it as ‘gothic’ I think is the centrality of setting. There is a house, a hotel, some old building with a long past, and most of the plot centres around and takes place in this building or property.  E.g. Michael Kortya again in The Cypress House .  Tana French’s The Likeness is set almost exclusively in crumbling Irish manor house and has very much to do with the “unreliability of memory” yet there is not the slightest hint of a paranormal element or romance.

Do you love the modern Gothic, or remember much loved books from the past? Why not share some names with us.

 ***

Vicki Delany is one of Canada’s most varied and prolific crime writers.  Her popular Constable Molly Smith series (including In the Shadow of the Glacier and Among the Departed) have been optioned for TV by Brightlight Pictures.  She also writes standalone novels of psychological suspense, as well as a light-hearted historical series, (Gold Digger, Gold Mountain), set in the raucous heyday of the Klondike Gold Rush.  

Vicki’s newest book is More than Sorrow, a standalone novel published by Poisoned Pen Press.  In a starred review, Library Journal called the book, “a splendid Gothic thriller.”

Having taken early retirement from her job as a systems analyst in the high-pressure financial world, Vicki is settling down to the rural life in bucolic, Prince Edward County, Ontario where she rarely wears a watch.

Visit Vicki at www.vickidelany.com , www.facebook.com/vicki.delany, and twitter: @vickidelany. She blogs about the writing life at One Woman Crime Wave (http://klondikeandtrafalgar.blogspot.com) 

If You're Reading Louise Penny, Grab Vicki Delany's New MORE THAN SORROW

I'm a committed fan of Vicki Delany's police series featuring Constable Molly Smith, with its solid traditional mystery format and beguiling protagonist. So I took a leap of faith and picked up her newest title, which is NOT part of that series. Instead, MORE THAN SORROW (Library Journal starred review!) is a gothic novel: that is, a dark, suspenseful work of fiction that hinges on the disturbances within its characters. There may indeed be crime involved also, and that's certainly true of MORE THAN SORROW, where death threats and other criminal activities have destroyed the idyllic back-to-the-land organic commitment at the little vegetable farm owned by Hannah Manning's sister.

But it's Hannah who's fascinating here: An internationally recognized war journalist, she's recuperating at her sister's home, from a traumatic brain injury that threatens to rob her of more than her career. Plagued by debilitating migraines, unexpected collapses, and frightening flashbacks to the "IED" that blew her life into grief and loss, Hannah reaches out to an Afghan refugee staying on a neighboring property in the rolling fields and woods of Prince Edward County, Ontario.

If you read my "headline," by now you are saying, "What on earth does this have to do with Louise Penny's books? Is it just that this is another Canadian author?"

Much more than that.

Penny's Chief Inspector Armand Gamache series, set in Three Pines, is a dark exploration of how murder arrives within "nice" communities, grows from otherwise tender hearts, roots in compromises of loyalty and integrity. And is seeded by the past. Three Pines, in fact, is named for the three pine trees planted (and since then, re-planted) by "Loyalist" settlers of the region -- British citizens appalled by the rebellion taking place in America. I've mostly ignored that aspect while reading Penny's crime fiction, while chasing her compelling characters and plot. But listening to her last week, I realized that the tension between the Loyalist settlers and today's French Canadians is a large part of the roiling tension underlying her Gamache series.

And that brings me back to Delany's MORE  THAN SORROW, in which Hannah Manning -- unable to make her damaged brain/eye circuits cope with typed pages of today's books -- grows obsessed with old hand-written letters that document the 1784 Loyalist refugees from America, who arrived in Canada and had to put their once-wealthy, cultured lives on hold, while becoming farmers. And for letter writer Maggie Macgregor, whose husband and child are dead and whose "extended family" has brought her to this harsh northern frontier, there are worse consequences than laboring with her hands. Will she be sexually abused as well? Hannah's own brain injury somehow short-circuits into Maggie's life, and the puzzle of three refugees -- Hannah, Maggie, and Afghani Hila Popalzai -- takes on risk and tension, especially threatening to Hannah's ten-year-old niece Lila, who may be the only person who still believes and adores her aunt.

As Hannah begins to grapple with solving the criminal threats to her community, she also struggles to regain her old capacities. And she works against something darker, that ineffable something that makes a modern Gothic novel dig its way into our own doubts and fears.

An explosion. A car on fire. Guns going off. Men firing rifles and cheering the flames on. Women weeping horror. Children screaming, calling for their mothers.

That's Hannah's recollection. But it connects in haunting fashion with the letters in her fist.

So -- not only is this a great read to gather a sense of the Loyalist history that threads through Prince Edward County, Ontario, Canada (and lies under the Louise Penny setting in Three Pines). It's also a disturbing and ultimately confirming exploration of how one woman takes a stand in her own life. Thanks, Vicki Delany; I'll keep thinking of Hannah, as I explore more of your books.

SPECIAL NOTE!! Vicki Delany explores what "the modern Gothic novel" is, and why it is that way, from the point of view of an expert in several fiction genres. Check out her guest post here in the evening on Friday Sept. 7. We've got a lot to enjoy in this!

Calendar Alert: Carla Neggers Sept. 9, Vicki Delany Sept. 7

The newest books are arriving, the book room is getting happily rearranged, and we are very excited to be hosting Carla Neggers -- author of more than 70 books, most recently the highly enjoyable romantic suspense HERON'S COVE (set in Maine) -- here on Sunday Sept. 9 at 1 p.m. Hope you can be here! If you need a signed copy but can't make it to Vermont this time, contact Dave directly and he'll set one aside for you (dknel@charter.net).

By the way, I am fascinated by Carla's Pinterest site: http://pinterest.com/carlaneggers. It's a great example of how photos enrich fiction and give us insight into authors and their books. I followed up on the pix on her "Fabulous Russian Jewelry" Pinterest board and found the ring shown here, from the jewelry business Romanov Russia (http://www.romanovrussia.com/RosenRing.html). What do Russian jewels have to do with suspense? Come on, read the book (or review -- click here) and/or come meet author Carla Neggers!

While you're marking your calendar, TOMORROW EVENING Friday Sept. 7, Canadian mystery author Vicki Delany posts here as our guest, with a thoughtful and knowledgeable contribution on "The Modern Gothic Novel." Yes, that has a lot to do with today's mysteries, as well as a wider range of fiction. Stop in and check it out!