99 pages
Published 2021
Read from June 5 to June 6
Rating: 4 out of 5
As far as I know, the only gothic novel of any sort I've read before this was Monica Heath's Dunleary, a trashy and deeply misogynistic morality tale that did nothing to encourage me to seek out more of its ilk. My partner R has the same soft spot for "women running away from a house" books that I harbor toward crappy midcentury pulp, however, and slowly I've grown more intrigued about the genre. When I learned that a certain indie press had published a modern queering of gothic horror, I just had to give it a try.
Wagner's prose atmospherically unfurls a gothic tale that fits comfortably within the expected parameters of "woman running away from the house" horror: buried family secrets, repressed memories, half-forgotten tragedies, all breathing malevolent life into a once-magnificent manor house in a remote corner of 1920s Oregon. Wagner doesn't shy away from the racist underbelly of Oregon's white elites. Slight spoilers: The forbidden love that awakens between our narrator and her brother's new bride is stirring and far more believable than the so-called romance at the center of Dunleary. Everything is better when it's gay.
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