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Book Review: The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein by Kiersten White

The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein by Kiersten White

Delacorte, 2018

ISBN-13: 978-0525577942

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

 

Elizabeth Lavenza is the ultimate example of the “cool girl”  described by Amy Dunne in Gone Girl: she is never herself, always what someone else (usually a man) needs her to be. An orphan purchased by the Frankenstein family to be solitary Victor’s friend, she knows her status is always endangered unless she can demonstrate how much she is needed. From the very first, the observant Elizabeth is aware that there is something not quite right with Victor, that she is needed to help him become socially acceptable on the surface, while covering up and erasing his more disturbing behavior, and she does everything she can to make certain he needs her as much as she needs him. Her only friend is Justine, a girl she rescued from an abusive mother and was able to have installed as governness for Victor’s younger brothers– but even Justine does not know the extent of what Elizabeth has done to make herself essential to Victor and his family. At the same time, knowing that he can be erratic, unreliable, and sometimes even dangerous, she alters herself  in his absence to appeal to Henry Clerval, a bright and optimistic young man of the merchant class who is mesmerized by both Victor and Elizabeth. As duplicitous as Elizabeth is, she knows she cannot keep it up indefinitely, and she is at a desperate disadvantage in Victor’s absence once he leaves for university and stops responding to her letters. Finding him, saving him, and covering up his disturbing actions while also trying to avoid knowing exactly what he’s done is essential to her continued status as a ward of the Frankenstein family.

In the original novel, Elizabeth is an afterthought as Victor Frankenstein tells his story– she doesn’t even have a speaking part, and while he is completely involved in his obsession, she totally disappears from the story. White fills in some of those blanks by placing Elizabeth at the scene of Victor’s crimes and experiments in Ingolstadt and making her complicit in covering them up. The abusive nature of the Frankensteins’ relationship with Elizabeth is such that she is able to even deceive herself about horrific events that it is clear to the reader were caused by Victor’s activities. Anyone who has read Frankenstein knows what happens to Justine and Victor’s younger brother, William, but it’s after this that the novel takes a left turn. Learning that Victor did successfully create a monster, Elizabeth overhears a conversation between the monster and Victor that leads her to believe that something terrible is supposed to happen on her wedding night. Rather than being smothered as she is in the novel, Victor reveals his terrible acts and future plans to immortalize Elizabeth. When she reacts in horror and threatens to expose him, he has her committed to an asylum, diagnosed with hysteria. This was an outstanding move on the author’s part. Few YA readers are probably aware of the injustice that allowed women to be committed to asylums based only on their husband’s or father’s assertion that they were mentally disturbed (since most won’t read “The Yellow Wallpaper” until college) but it did actually happen and is a very clever way of getting Elizabeth out of the way so the Frankenstein story can advance further.

I totally understand wanting to give Elizabeth a voice, flesh out Justine, and add another female character to the story (Mary Delgado, a bookseller from Ingolstadt and Elizabeth’s rescuer, the most sensible and likable person in the book). It’s not just unsatisfying but infuriating that in Shelley’s novel Elizabeth and Justine basically exist to be fridged. And I appreciate that White worked hard to create an Elizabeth of her times, who was invalidated and gaslighted by the men in her life in a way that forced her to navigate social and gender roles seamlessly in order to believe she could have a place at all. There is some great writing here, especially in scenes where she takes an active role in witnessing, encouraging or covering up Victor’s deeply disturbing actions (there is a scene with a bird’s nest at the beginning and another with Victor’s brother that will stick with me for a long time), on her wedding night, and in the asylum. But somehow, as a whole, the book doesn’t quite ring true for me, and I feel that it’s longer than it needs to be. I want to like it, and it could just be that after a year of reading about Mary Shelley and Frankenstein I’m worn down,  but Elizabeth as a character doesn’t stand on her own, and I don’t think her voice successfully carries the story on its own, either. Just as Gone Girl’s Amy Dunne can’t tell the entire story of her twisted marriage on her own, Elizabeth needs another voice to balance hers in telling her story. Recommended for Frankenstein-lovers, if they haven’t burned out after a year of adaptations, retellings, critical studies, and biographies, and for teens who enjoy complex characters and have strong stomachs.

Editor’s Note: The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein by Kiersten White is on the final ballot for the 2018 Stoker Award in the category of Superior Achievement in a Young Adult Novel.

 

Posted on March 23, 2019 by , Reply

Musings: Drawing on the Walls: The Boy Who Drew Cats

The Boy Who Drew Cats adapted by Lafcadio Hearn and Margaret Hodges, and illustrated by Aki Sogabe

Holiday House, 2002

ISBN-13: 978-0823415946

Available:  Used hardcover and paperback, Audible audiobook

 

I had a reader request the name of a book about a little boy drawing all over the walls. The classic story about a boy drawing himself into a story is Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson, but that didn’t seem quite right. I finally remembered a Japanese folktale about a boy who drew all over the walls of a temple and drove a demon away, and was able to find what I think is really the answer to this question; it’s a story called “The Boy Who Drew Cats”, and it has been adapted and illustrated many times. The copy pictured above was adapted by Lafcadio Hearn and Margaret Hodges, and illustrated by Aki Sogabe, but there are MANY other versions.

The story follows a young man who is obsessed with drawing cats; he draws only cats, but he draws them amazingly well. Forced to leave home to find a trade, he spends the night in an abandoned temple, with empty screens all around, just begging to be painted with cats. After painting the walls, the boy falls asleep, waking in the night to hear a tremendous fight. In the morning, he discovers a terrible rat demon, dead, and notices the cats on the screens are not in the same positions he had painted them in. His cats have defeated the monster and saved his life, revealing his artistic ability and enabling him to become a professional artist.

Walls can be the source of creativity, as they are in the nonfiction picture book Painting for Peace in Ferguson, a story about the creative approach the community of Ferguson took to beautify  and inspire neighborhoods where the buildings had been boarded up or defaced following demonstrations against police brutality that turned violent. They can become a personification of insanity or paranoia, as they are in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”, in which the protagonist has delusions of a trapped woman creeping behind the room’s wallpaper, or the whispers from her dead mother that one character hears in Amy Lukavics’ The Women in the Walls.

Walls can be an “in-between” place, as they are in Neil Gaiman’s The Wolves in the Walls and Coraline,  in which the main characters have to make choices about whether they will be passive or active participants in their own lives. If you are on the outside, walls can be a barrier you look to cross that conceal a treasure inside, as in The Secret Garden, and if you are on the inside they can be a trap– a haunted house that won’t let go, a locked-room mystery you can’t escape, like the inhabitants of the island in Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. If you are the builder, like Hugh Crain in The Haunting of Hill House, you can make the walls be disorienting and disturbing to inhabitants to influence their minds, and if you want to keep people away, like Baba Yaga, you can decorate with human skulls.

Or you can follow your passion where it goes, and both protect and beautify the world by transforming walls into something new, like the boy who drew cats.

Posted on December 13, 2017 by , Reply

Guest Post by Paula Cappa: The Literary Ladies of Horror’s Haunted Mountain

It may not be February, but October is just as good a time (if not a better one) to recognize women in horror, especially women writers. Paula Cappa, author of the supernatural novels The Dazzling Darkness and Night Sea Journey (both reviewed here), gives us her take on women writers in the genre from the beginnings of their journey until the present day. Love quiet horror? Visit her blog to discover what classic story she’s presenting as her Tuesday Tale of Terror. Really. It’s awesome.

Want another take on women writers in the horror genre? Check out this post by Colleen Wanglund, which includes a fantastic list of contemporary women writers and recommended titles.

The Literary Ladies of Horror’s Haunted Mountain

By Paula Cappa

If there is ever a time to hear a night-shriek, it is October, a month that welcomes readers to the dark mountain of the horror genre. Listen to the hallowed voices, their devouring muscular growls and hot stinging hisses. Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, author of MaddAddam, says “Some may look skeptically at ‘horror’ as a subliterary genre, but in fact, horror is one of the most literary of all forms.”

The literary ladies at the summit are as ghoul-haunted as the gentlemen claiming Haunted Mountain as their territory with their persistent footprints and pulsing voices. Their names are familiar: Poe, Hoffman, James, Blackwood, LeFanu, Lovecraft, Stoker, King, Koontz, Herbert, Straub, Saul, Strieber, Bradbury, Barker, Campbell– the list goes on.

With women so under-represented, one would think the only woman writing horror in the early years was Mary Shelley, setting up ropes and spikes, blazing a wide path up horror’s haunted mountain with Frankenstein in 1818. But look closely at the mountain, and you’ll find the distinctive footprints of Ann Radcliffe, who tore open supernatural paths with The Mysteries of Udolpho as early as 1794. Radcliffe’s writing of suspense about castles and dark villains influenced Dumas, Scott, and Hugo. Mary Elizabeth Braddon, author of Eveline’s Visitant, wrote eighty novels and volumes of short stories during the 1800s, and was known as the Queen of Sensation. The little-known and much-overlooked Margaret Oliphant scaled the rocky mountainside with a heady ghost story, “The Secret Chamber.

By 1865, Amelia Edwards’  The Phantom Coach cut popular tracks across the haunted mountain. Helena Petrovna Blavatsky cleared the way for future women writers with her collection of nightmare tales, The Ensouled Violin, as did Elizabeth Gaskell with The Poor Clare, which deals with a family evil curse, complete with witches and ghosts. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”, written at the turn of the century, became the earliest feminist literature to expose 19th century attitudes against women’s mental health, in less than 6000 words. I like to think of Charlotte as the Wallerina, dancing up the haunted mountain.

Gothic writers like Edith Wharton (Afterward) and Mary Wilkins (Collected Ghost Stories) remain treasures.  V.C. Andrews, Shirley Jackson, Daphne du Maurier, Mary Sinclair, Rosemary Timperley, Victoria Holt, Mary Stewart, Joan Aiken, Phyllis Whitney, and Barbara Michaels, all were prolific writers on horror’s haunted mountain during the 20th century, and some are still writing today. Then, of course, there’s Anne Rice, with her newest release The Wolves of MidWinter. This queen of the damned has practically established a private driveway up the haunted mountain, with more than thirty enormously successful novels of vampires, angels, demons, spirits, wolves, and witches.

Horror’s haunted mountain, traveled by women writers from Ann Radcliffe to Anne Rice, is still being trailblazed by fresh talents, writers of gothic, ghost, supernatural, traditional, and dark horror: Alexandra Sokoloff, The Unseen; Barbara Erskine, House of Echoes; Caitlin R. Kiernan, The Drowning Girl; Chesya Burke, Dark Faith; Elizabeth Massie, Hell Gate; Gemma Files, The Worm in Every Heart; Joyce Carol Oates, The Accursed; Kelley Armstrong, Bitten; Linda D. Addison, How to Recognize a Demon Has Become Your Friend; M.J. Rose, Seduction; Melanie Tem, Slain in the Spirit; Nancy Baker, Kiss of the Vampire; Nancy Holder, Dead in Winter; Poppy Z. Brite, Drawing Blood; Rose Earhart, Salem’s Ghost; Susan Hill, The Woman in Black; too many more to list.

What about the short story? Look to Billie Sue Mosiman, with 150 short stories to her credit. Her “Quiet Room” is about a ruthless evil killer, written in “quiet horror” fashion. For collections, try authors Kaaron Warren’s Dead Sea Fruit, Carole Lanham’s The Whisper Jar, and Fran Friel’s Mama’s Boy and Other Dark Tales.

Men may continue to dominate horror’s haunted mountain, just as women continue to be fierce climbers with hawkish voices. But story is story; writers are writers. What does gender matter in art? In the words of Virginia Woolf: “It is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly.” Oh wait, I forgot one more ghostly title for you: Virginia Woolf’s A Haunted House.

Bio:

Paula Cappa is a published short story author, novelist, and freelance copy editor. Her short fiction has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, Every Day Fiction, Fiction365, Twilight Times Ezine, and in anthologies Human Writes Literary Journal, and Mystery Time. Cappa’s writing career began as a freelance journalist for newspapers in New York and Connecticut. Her debut novel Night Sea Journey, A Tale of the Supernatural launched in 2012. The Dazzling Darkness, her second novel, won the Gothic Readers Book Club Choice Award for outstanding fiction. She writes a weekly fiction blog about classic short stories, Reading Fiction,Tales of Terror, on her Web site http://paulacappa.wordpress.com/

 

Posted on October 3, 2013 by , 1 comment
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