In the Night Wood, by Dale Bailey. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018

This story is almost over the top gothic. It begins with a husband and wife, Charles and Erin Hayden, inheriting a fortune and a huge manor house in England, one surrounded with primeval forest. They are a miserable pair; he had an affair with a co-worker, their daughter died as a direct result of this, his academic career is stalled, and the wife has retreated into a haze of alcohol and prescription drugs. They hope this move will help them move on, but the house belonged to Caedmon Hollow, who wrote a Victorian dark fairy tale that Charles has been obsessed with since childhood. Erin is the last survivor of the family

They find the place unsettling; they see images of their dead daughter everywhere. The forest is moving closer to the house. Charles, looking into the past to write a biography of Caedmon Hollow, meets Silva, the head of the village’s historical society. She’s an intelligent and attractive woman, and her daughter is almost a carbon copy of Charles’ and Erin’s dead daughter. You can see where this might head. The whole situation is a great set up for supernatural horror.

Sadly, I ended up not caring for the book very much. Charles is an unlikable main character, even though he’s supposed to be seeking redemption. Erin is a mere shadow of a person. The other characters start with great potential, but end up just props for Charles. The ‘feel’ of the story is wonderfully full of dread, as the unknown closes in. I loved the use of Celtic mythology. Charles and Erin’s grief is portrayed beautifully, if that word can be used for grief. But the end came rushing too suddenly; it was tied up as if the author had a deadline to meet. I give it four stars for gothic suspense; can’t give it five because of the main characters.

Black Rabbit Hall, by Eve Chase. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2016

‘Black Rabbit Hall’ starts off fairly slow; Lorna and her fiancé are looking for a wedding venue in 1999 or so, and Pencraw (the Black Rabbit Hall of the title) in Cornwall is first on her list, despite its decrepit condition and odd owner and manager. In 1968, young teen Amber Alton and her very happy and close family (Toby, her twin; young Barney; and baby Kitty) are leaving London for the summer at Pencraw, their ancestral estate. But it’s not long before things change; tragedy strikes the Alton family. The event shatters the close family; some do not have the coping skills to survive it. And the way the father choses to try and survive creates further problems that will echo through the years, intersecting with Lorna’s life.

The prose is lush and beautiful. Multi-sensory descriptions abound, allowing the reader to fully inhabit the story. While I had suspicions of how the story would wind up, it ended up surprising me. I stayed up late reading this book, and grabbed it again in the morning. Despite being set in the Cornish countryside and having no supernatural elements, it reads like a Southern gothic- at one point I thought it was going to go all ‘Flowers in the Attic’-ack. It’s family drama at its craziest, but with touches of sweetness.

It does have faults. While Chase has description and setting down pat, some of her character building is lacking. The wicked step-mother is pretty much nothing but wicked; she has not one redeeming feature or even any characteristic other than ‘wicked’. Father Alton is pretty one dimensional as well. Amber (the narrator of most of the story) is the most complex character because we spend so much time in her head; she’s got a good range of emotions and motives and I felt a lot of sympathy for her. Lorna, for some reason, is kind of blah even though she is the other main character. In some ways, she’s simply a device for the family secrets to be unveiled. Despite this character problem, the book is highly readable and compelling.

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Usher’s Passing, by Robert R. McCammon. Pocket Books, 1984

In this sequel to Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”, McCammon proposes that not all of the Usher family died at the end of the story, that a brother lived on. And while the brother had the Usher Malady, he also had the power to attract good things to him And the family prospered, beyond all imagination. But the power did not come without strings attached; while materially blessed, the people of the family all have major problems.

Rix Usher is the family black sheep; he escaped the family estate and has had a career as an author, but now he finds himself with writer’s block. When his father sends the older son, Boone, to fetch him to his death bed, he decides to go, despite swearing he’d never go back. This places him in a veritable cornucopia of weirdness.

This is, bar none, the gothiest novel I have ever read. We have a southern mansion. We have a mother who refuses to accept that her husband is dying, even though he’s rotting away- literally. An alcoholic, gambling, wife beating, bully of an elder brother. A sister who has done exceedingly well in business as a model, but is a drug addict. A lodge in the middle of the family estate that no one lives in that Rix got shut into as a child for two long, dark, terrifying days; a building that changes its layout on a whim. Mountain folk just outside the estate who believe in the Mountain King (good guy) and the Pumpkin Man (very bad guy who steals children), and a huge black panther named Greediguts. There is the teenage mountain boy who finds he has supernatural powers. There is also the ruins of a town that was smashed apart years ago buy comets. A newspaper owner who wants to know what’s going on with the family patriarch and her father, writing a history of the Usher family. And then there is the soul voices of reason: the head caretaker and his wife, who basically raised Rix, the only people who showed him love when he was growing up.

There is a LOT going on in this book. Every time you turn around there is a new twist. Almost no one is what they seem. There is a mix of supernatural, technical, and human evil. Threat is everywhere. This is one of the creepiest books I’ve ever read, despite it being so over the top. And it is very, very, over the top. But, damn, I loved it! 

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The Accursed, by Joyce Carol Oates. Harper Collins, 2013

I’m a big fan of Joyce Carol Oates, so when I discovered she had a new book out, I was excited. I was even happier when I found that it was another volume in the gothic family saga series she started many years ago with ‘Bellefleur’, which is one of my favorite books. The 660 page length didn’t bother me; she’s an author who, at her best, can fill that many pages with brilliance. I greeted the book like it was a big box of candy.  

I’m afraid I was disappointed. There are a lot of good things in the book-an extended patrician family living in Princeton is cursed. Voices say bad things to people, ghosts are seen, a shape shifting demon walks among them and leads them into tragedies. At the same time, they have to deal with the demons of their everyday life: racism, misogyny, classism, the Machiavellian politics of Princeton University. I liked having a narrator who only knew the story through the diaries and papers he discovered long after the events took place. Half the population of the book are real people: Woodrow Wilson is president of Princeton U, Grover Cleveland and his wife are part of the social circle, Upton Sinclair has a large part devoted to him, Jack London, Theodore Roosevelt and Mark Twain all make appearances. But the lessons about society are a little heavy handed, and I’m really not sure that some of the historical characters added to the story. Upton Sinclair and Jack London didn’t seem to be connected to the family and the curse but took up a lot of pages. The only way I could see that they added to the story was by showing the reader what the attitudes of people of the time were, but I know enough history that I didn’t need that and I’m sure there are many other readers like me.

Oates has written a great story, but every story needs an editor. At least a hundred pages could have been cut without the story losing anything and the book would have been much sharper. I enjoyed the book, but got impatient with it frequently.