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Book Review: What Should Be Wild by Julia Fine

What Should Be Wild by Julia Fine

Harper, 2018

ISBN-13: 978-0062684134

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook, audio CD

 

What Should Be Wild is a flawed, if gorgeously written dark fairytale. Julia Fine has outdone herself in establishing a disturbing, unwieldy, and wild Gothic setting for her story of  Maisie, a girl born with the power of life and death in her touch. The women of the Blakely family are believed to be under a curse: many of them have terrible stories that led them into the dark wood behind the family home, Urizon, never to be seen again. The story alternates between the present day, with Maisie narrating, and third-person narratives about the other Blakely women who disappeared, who are now trapped in a timeless dimension in the wood where things are just starting to change.

Not without reason, Maisie has been kept in isolation from the rest of the world by her anthropologist father and the family housekeeper. Unable to touch without killing, she is starved for affection, and has to work to suppress her urges to touch the things and people around her, following rules strictly enforced by her father. Her solace is in stories, especially local history and customs, folklore, and fairytales. These stories, and the structure imposed on her by her father, are the only patterns she has for connecting to the world around her– in short, she is naive, sheltered, and unable to imagine people who don’t follow the patterns of the narratives she knows.  When she discovers the family housekeeper’s death and runs away to process it, she discovers on her return that her father has disappeared to search for her. Matthew, the housekeeper’s nephew, steps in to accompany her when she decides to search for him. They then encounter Rafe, who claims to be a colleague of her father’s also looking for him– that both he and her father have been searching for a way to enter the wild wood where the Blakely women are trapped. Up to the point that Maisie encounters Rafe, her first-person narration is really interesting. It gets us inside her head, as an unusual child with perceptions that are far different than the norm. At that point, Maisie’s naivete becomes more and more frustrating, as it becomes quickly obvious what the characters’ motivations are, and they become pretty one-dimensional for most of the journey.

When the search takes the three of them to the city, both men disappear from the picture, and Maisie is left in a horrific situation. She is drugged and trapped, without means of escape, while a man drains her of blood for a mysterious purpose, and after several weeks he realizes that her power can be used to his financial benefit, as when she “kills” an animal, it enters stasis rather than decaying. The terrifying months of being drained and having angry animals released into the room she’s locked in are horrific to read about and jarring compared to the rest of the book, but Maisie’s lack of agency and desperation, and her connection to the wood behind Urizon, start to affect the actions and events occurring among the Blakely women and the growth of the wood.

The stories of each of the Blakely women trapped in the wood, written in third person, are interspersed throughout Maisie’s story. This helps make them a little more real: otherwise they are really just a group of bodies and names. Each woman or girl in the wood in some way fell outside the narrative of conventional womanhood: too ill, too unattractive, too stubborn, too disobedient, too old, too foreign, too promiscuous. Yet, falling outside the narrative of conventional womanhood doesn’t mean they don’t have their own stories, although the stories have become more of tales cautioning people against entering the wood, than local history connected to any particular name. Maisie, too, has her own story connected to the woods, and it starts out much like a quest narrative– but the actual ending doesn’t require the kind of challenge I had expected and is rather anticlimactic.

I had some frustrations with the way characters were portrayed in this book. With its strong connection to a fairy-tale style of writing, I wasn’t expecting all fully developed characters, especially in the woods and the stories of the Blakely women, since most fairy tale characters are stand-ins for archetypes. But this is a novel, not a fairytale, and a little more depth and consistency with the characters of Matthew, Rafe, and Peter would have been appreciated. The book also had some confusing moments and left many unanswered questions. For instance, Maisie’s dog and her relationship with him was very odd, and the overprotective Matthew suddenly leaving Maisie when he knew she was vulnerable was surprising. The actions of the unknown girl in the forest were baffling.

This book has been described as a feminist fairytale, and it certainly does hit you over the head with its repeated focus on women’s lack of agency and the way they have been forced to suppress their desires in favor of fitting a pre-existing narrative of femininity. That is a strong and important message. But I really felt the lack of any  fully (or even mostly) supportive male characters was a disservice. Every single man in this book was trying to control some woman’s body or actions, if not physically, than by patronizing, threatening, or manipulating them. This was true even for Matthew, who was the most sympathetic male character. Given the treatment of all the women in this book, the curse of the Blakely women appears to be not that they were so desperate to escape the men victimizing them that they’d rather spend eternity in the wood but that hundreds of years later, while women might have evolved, men’s treatment of them pretty much hadn’t changed at all. While the fairytale here appears to have a happy ending for Maisie, the story of the women in the wood, and the world, is ongoing.

Despite any issues I have with it, this is an unusual, compelling, and memorable story, with lush and beautiful writing. It doesn’t move quickly, but you will find yourself lost inside Fine’s dark, wild, wood, and in her tale, if you care to enter. Highly recommended.

 

Contains: body horror, cannibalism, animal cruelty, murder, torture.

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

 

Editor’s note: What Should Be Wild is a nominee on the final ballot for the 2018 Bram Stoker Awards. 

Book Review: Unbury Carol by Josh Malerman

Unbury Carol by Josh Malerman

Del Rey Books, 2018

ISBN-13: 978-0399180163

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook

 

Josh Malerman is arguably the best new writer horror has witnessed in the past decade. His debut novel, Bird Box, was truly original and was recently made into an outstanding movie by Netflix. Black Mad Wheel added a musical touch to the weird and supernatural, Goblin tied six mind-bending tales together into a town that Ray Bradbury and Charles Grant would love, and the recently released Inspection is an intriguing dystopian look at gender roles, education, and parenting.

Unbury Carol takes a sharp left turn into a world familiar to Joe Lansdale and John Wayne. The plot of this Gothic-tinged historical horror novel with a hint of romance whisks readers back to the Old West in the 1800’s, complete with cowboys, stagecoaches, and saloons filled with whiskey, cards, and women.

Carol Evers has a unique medical condition. She can’t stop dying. Literally. She periodically falls into a coma so deep that doctors believe she’s dead. Only a few people are aware of the illness: her awful husband, Dwight; her two friends; and her long-lost love, the outlaw James Moxie.

When the coma hits, Carol freefalls into a dark world she’s named Howltown, a place where she’s not alone, but as in life, cannot move. Dwight decides to go after her fortune and declare her dead. A telegram makes its way to Moxie, twenty years gone from Carol’s life but still pining for her. Moxie hits the infamous Trail, where unspeakable, legendary horrors occur daily, blazing his own path, to save Carol before she is covered by six feet of fresh dirt. He is unaware that a deadly hired gun is hot on his tail, a sadistic man who leaves a path of burned destruction behind him. Meanwhile, Carol fights her own battle within Howltown, struggling to awaken, to move, to let the world know of her husband’s diabolical plans. On the periphery, Rot, an intriguing supernatural character, taunts both Moxie and Carol in their efforts to remain in the land of the living.

This novel begins as a slow burn like the best Western films of the sixties, and slowly catches fire, grasping hold of readers with a strong narrative that feels like what you’d get in a Clint Eastwood movie, if he traded drinks with Stephen King. This book will likely draw some comparisons to some of the greats, but deserves its own category and acclaim.

Unbury Carol is easily one of the best and most original novels readers will love in 2018.

Editor’s note: Unbury Carol is a candidate on the final ballot for the 2018 Bram Stoker Award in the category of Superior Achievement in a Novel. 

 

Women in Horror Month: Gothic Tales by Elizabeth Gaskell, edited by Laura Kranzler

Gothic Tales by Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, edited by Laura Kranzler

Penguin, 2001

ISBN-13: 978-0140437416

Available: New and used paperback, Kindle edition

In the spirit of Women in Horror Month, I try every year to read something by a woman writer of Gothic fiction, horror or supernatural fiction that may not be well known today. Sometimes these writers are not known of to any but the most enthusiastic researchers and readers, and sometimes they are known, but not for their Gothic or supernatural fiction (Edith Wharton, for example). Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell may be a little of both. Like many women writers in the Romantic or Victorian era, Gaskell’s work was dismissed as old-fashioned or sentimental by literary critics for much of the 20th century. She was a contemporary of Charles Dickens, and her work was frequently published by him, but while Dickens was assigned reading when I was in high school, I had never even heard of Gaskell until I started looking into women writers of the 19th and early 20th century during Women in Horror Month several years ago. And Gaskell, even now that she is better-known (and she is much better known now) is mainly known for her novels of social realism, not her ghost stories and Gothic tales. It’s not that difficult to go to Amazon and find most of her novels, but my library didn’t have a collection of her short stories. When I searched Amazon for a collection of her work several months back, I found just one book that I knew for sure would have her Gothic tales in it, Gothic Tales (of course. I can now find several collections of her stories available, many of which came out last year, so go figure).

Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (1810-1865) was just thirteen years younger than Mary Shelley. Her parents, William and Elizabeth Stevenson, were not famous or controversial. While, like Shelley, Elizabeth’s mother died when she was too young to remember her, and she spent much of her childhood away from her father, acquiring a stepmother when she was four, the rest of her life was much more conventional. In 1832 she married William Gaskell, the assistant pastor of the Unitarian church in Manchester, England, and took on the duties of a minister’s wife: teaching Sunday school, visiting the poor, and other charitable activities. She gave birth to four children, three girls (Marianne, Margaret Emily, and Florence) and a boy, William, who died after a bout of scarlet fever. Gaskell had already had a few short stories published, and her husband suggested she work on a novel as a way of dealing with her grief over William’s death.

Manchester was a busy, industrial town, with many living in poverty while others acquired considerable fortunes. It had a growing artistic community, as well as many people interested in social justice and radical politics. Gaskell, as a minister’s wife and writer, had the opportunity to observe people of all kinds and social classes and their problems, and she used her observations in her writing. Like her contemporary, Charles Dickens (who actually published some of her work), she used entertaining and suspenseful plots to draw attention and sympathy to the plight of the impoverished. She was also friends with Charlotte Bronte, and wrote a biography of her.

In 1846, a fourth daughter, Julia was born, and several years later she and her family moved to a larger house, where she hosted many important visitors, while still carrying on with charitable works and continuing to write stories and novels. She traveled, often with her children, and enjoyed an active social life until she died in 1865. I know, not the life of a tortured, romantic soul. Her short fiction is where Gothic horror touches her work.

Reading Gaskell’s short stories  is like watching a meandering train journey that you know is going to end in a wreck of some kind. Her stories take the time to build character and setting through minor incidents that create uneasy circumstances, creating a slow burn as the tension increases, until suddenly a terrifying main event occurs (a murder, home invasion, or accusation, for example). In The Crooked Branch, it’s easy to see  this process in action: how Nathan and Hester, uneducated farmers indulging and justifying early selfish acts in their son Benjamin out of love leads to his developing into a selfish, uncaring adult who manipulates them and his cousin Bessy (and a title like The Crooked Branch is solid foreshadowing that there isn’t some kind of redemption at the end). But we see these indulgences and excuses one at a time, as they pile up: as his character worsens, they become even more difficult to explain, even after explosive and violent events. In the end, it is not only the damage done to them physically and mentally that is the most difficult for all three to suffer, but their admission of their complicity in making him what he has become.

Lois the Witch is harder to bear, because Lois, a young English Catholic whose parents have died, is a victim all the way through the story, which is a fictionalized reimagining of the Salem Witch Trials. Sent to America to live with her Puritan aunt and uncle, she is never treated as welcome despite all her efforts to be helpful, caring, and virtuous. A long, slowly developing series of events lead us toward what we know will be the accusation of witchcraft aimed at her by her cousins and aunt. Particularly disturbing elements of this story include the fixation of her mentally ill cousin Manasseh on marrying her. and the gaslighting that nearly convinces Lois that she must be a witch since everyone around her claims she is.  In The Gray Woman, the main character, rejected by her stepmother, is forced into an unwanted marriage with a wealthy man who lives in an isolated location, and keeps her locked up to prevent her discovering his dark secrets. While none of these stories touch on the supernatural, they certainly show the flaws in a system that protects privileged men such as Benjamin and Manasseh at the expense of vulnerable girls who see no other options.

Gaskell also writes about the consequences of evil passed down through generations. In The Doom of the Griffithsa curse passed through generations of family results in tragedy. This particular story feels especially tragic because Gaskell draws a sympathetic portrait of the last two generations and you truly feel that the curse will be broken. The Poor Clare demonstrates how twisted a curse can be, when Bridget, a former servant whose daughter has been lost to her,  has a curse she set on the owner of the estate after he killed her dog, turns back on her own family.  In both these stories, unfortunately, cruel and thoughtless actions of upper-class men have tragic results for young women. Evan as a respectable minister’s wife, Gaskell didn’t pull her punches when it came to the effects of cruelty on the vulnerable.

Houses as traps appear frequently in Gaskell’s stories. The Old Nurse’s Story is a terrifying ghost story that takes place in a falling-apart, disturbingly haunted mansion which the narrator, nurse to a young girl whose guardian has declared it her home, feels she cannot leave because of her concern for her charge. The main character in The Gray Woman, first trapped in her husband’s home, then in every other place she seeks refuge, ends up, even once she is safe, unable to leave her house.

Many of Gaskell’s stories are metafictional: The Poor Clare is told by a young man who finds himself involved in Bridget’s family’s affairs;  Disappearances reports stories the narrator supposedly found in the news; the majority of The Gray Woman  is told in a letter by the main character to her daughter, read by a visitor to a mill; and Curious, if True is indicated to be part of a letter even in the title. It’s an interesting trick that both pulls the reader in, because it creates the impression that we are hearing the story told directly to us, while also keeping us at a remove, because it draws attention to the fact that this is a story told by a storyteller,  about something that happened in the past, “long ago and far away”.

In addition to her gift at creating atmosphere and suspense, Gaskell has a fine imagination. Curious, if True stands out in the collection as a clever and fantastical story that integrates a contemporary character into a fairytale world, but is quite different from the others.

Gothic Tales has a useful, if lengthy, introduction, with notes and suggested reading, and additional notes in the back for reference in the individual stories, which is helpful when Gaskell makes contemporary references. I can’t say if it is the best or most complete collection of her Gothic and supernatural fiction, but it does contain some of her most well-known stories (The Poor Clare, The Nurse’s Story, The Gray Woman, Lois the Witch, The Crooked Branch). While there are other collections available now, I think this one was a good place to start.

Despite Gaskell being a talented Victorian writer, her work fell out of fashion for much of the 20th century, but it is now being recognized once again. While mostly known for her novels of social realism such as Mary Barton, Ruth, Sylvia’s Daughters, Cranford, North and South, and the unfinished Wives and Daughters, Gaskell’s Gothic and fantastical stories are worth tracking down. I must admit that this is my first experience reading the work of Elizabeth Gaskell, but I don’t think it will be the last. Whether you choose to take a look at this one or a different collection, I highly recommend you try her out.

Want to know more about Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell? 

Visit the Gaskell Society’s website.

Check out this New Yorker article about her,  “The Unjustly Overlooked Victorian Novelist Elizabeth Gaskell”.