Marginalia: House of Shadows, Darcy Coates (2015)

 

p. 1–2           Fancy clothes: check. Tall dark stranger: check. When and where are we? How old is our heroine Sophie? She seems like a youngish 18, but it’s been two years since her debut, she could be as old as 20.

 

p. 12             Everything is going much too fast to establish any emotional connection to Sophie. Still no idea when or where the scene is set. I’m guessing somewhere in the United States, likely New England, probably the late 1800s.

 

pp. 15–20     Sophie’s father has, predictably, lost the family fortune. They’re only half a step above poverty—the horror! Sophie’s younger brother Thomas will have to be a farmer! (The family can no longer afford to apprentice him to a lawyer, but buying the land, seed, equipment, livestock, and, one presumes, the training to set him up as a farmer is apparently not a problem.) Wait, doesn’t she have a rich uncle who takes her to the opera? Couldn’t he help?

 

I know the virgin sacrifice is a hallmark of gothic tales, but you’d think Sophie’s father would work a teensy bit harder to give her some other option. “This is your choice,” he tells her several times after he explains that the mysterious tall dark stranger she met the other night wants to marry her. Her father loves her so much that he just can’t think of any alternatives to her marrying a man she doesn’t know and finds distinctly threatening. Maybe he could go to their friends or relatives for financial assistance, or ask around for a wealthy lady who needs a companion? Or they could go live somewhere cheap like Paris, that’s where all the fancy people go when they lose their money in the 1800s, isn’t it? Nope. The only way to save them from barely clinging to middle-class respectability is to marry her off to his creepy business associate. But he’s not pressuring her. She mustn’t do it for her father’s sake. This is her choice. He really does love her very much.

 

p. 21             The marriage is fait accompli. It’s been two weeks since Sophie’s engagement was announced. This is high(ish) society—whether this is England or the Americas, in whatever pre-electricity era this is set in, that’s not a quick wedding, that’s a fucking scandal. She knows people will talk, but she thinks financial hardship would make tongues wag harder? Now Mr. and Mrs. Argenton are leaving for his distant home immediately after the ceremony, she doesn’t even get to show her face at the wedding breakfast. It’s a wonder no one’s taken her aside to ask whether she’s pregnant.

 

p. 77             Imagining what sort of Victorian publisher would produce a book about cryptids and the occult when the word cryptid wasn’t coined until the 1980s. Once again Sophie’s father proves how much he loves her by handing a pile of books to his then eight-year-old daughter and not bothering to look at what they are. Did a time traveler slip the book into the stack she was given?

 

p. 82             For a man so determined to marry Sophie, so quickly, Mr. Argenton shows no interest in her physically. Sophie, on the other hand, wants Mr. Argenton. Sophie needs Mr. Argenton. Fuck knows why, since they've spent all of approximately 12 hours in each other’s company and every few pages she wonders why he’s angry with her. Maybe someone slipped an aphrodisiac into her wine at dinner.

 

pp. 84–92     Mr. Argenton has been out hunting in the driving rain. Without a hat. As you do. He did take the trouble to cover his gun with a large cloth, which somehow is not soaked through like his clothes are. He abandons the gun cloth on the porch outside the front door, keeping his waterlogged coat and jacket on until he reaches the foyer, where the butler (not a footman or a maid) can wring them out on the marble floor and create a slip hazard. Water continues to run down Mr. Argenton’s face; maybe a tiny personal rain cloud followed him inside, he seems the type. Sophie’s sent for towels, but the scullery maid she spoke to (who really should be in the kitchen, not scampering about the upstairs) is taking her time. Why doesn’t he come up to her sitting room while they wait? He wants to go and dry off, but no, she’d prefer that he remain soaking wet and cold. All this ogling of her husband has finally convinced her to call him Joseph instead of Mr. Argenton.

 

Upstairs he finally gets some towels. Sophie, too busy admiring Joseph’s sculpted pecs through his wet shirt to notice that he’s injured, finally sees blood soaking through a bandage on his arm. Sophie is worried about how much blood he’s lost even though it’s taken her several minutes of staring at his wet shirt to notice he was bleeding at all. The bandage is under his shirt; it’s impressive that he was able to remove his shirt, bind the wound, put his shirt back on, all with one hand in the pouring rain, and not get blood on anything but the part of his sleeve where the wound is. The household medicine box contains ethanol, so it’s at least 1892; why doesn’t the super fancy house have a telephone? Why aren’t there any trains to travel by, instead of taking horse-drawn carriages everywhere?

 

p. 115            Joseph’s conception of love seems much like her father’s. Yes, Sophie dear, I know you’ve just been traumatized by the house locking you in a room and dumping gallons of blood on you, but this is my home and the ghosts are nice really, they just don’t know you yet. You’ll be splendid when you learn to be mistress of the house. I really love you very much.

 

p. 123            Darling Sophie, this is the 1800s, you’re married now, you can’t appear in public with your hair cascading down your back. It isn’t done, people will think you’re a tart. Well, Rose will, there doesn’t seem to be anyone else around to care.

 

p. 128            Northwood House is 400 years old? Was it built by magic? They’re not in England or Australia—Sophie is served “cookies”, not “biscuits”—so how did Matthias Argenton find himself in the middle of a forest in the northeastern part of the Americas in the fifteenth (sixteenth?) century?

 

Matthias Argenton married and his wife bore him a dozen children, all boys, inside a decade (dear god that poor woman). Against the odds, all the boys survived to adulthood, married, and had families of their own. If the family grew to “more than 50” people—so less than 60—it’s not possible for each of the twelve sons to have fathered lots of children. They, their wives, and the original couple would have been the first 26 people, leaving 24 or so to come, that’s no more than two or three kids per couple. Are Joseph and Sophie just really bad at math? If the house was built c. 1500 why do the descriptions make it sound like a Bavarian castle? Are the front porch and the marble floors later additions?

 

p. 133            Does it make you a bad person if you see a young woman some 10 years younger than you, hear the next day that her father has been financially ruined, and the day after that you propose to her, knowing she can’t afford to refuse you? Yes, dude, that makes you a fucking predator. Except that you don’t seem to want to touch your lovely new wife aside from stroking her hair, so yay for self-restraint, I guess.

 

p. 158            Sophie must indeed be bad with numbers if she can’t count the number of times she’s gotten lost in the house over the course of three days.

 

p. 177           Why is it that Sophie’s always being brought a plate of cookies, plural, but whenever she eats—or decides not to eat—there’s only the one cookie? Where do the other cookies go? Are the house monsters eating them?

 

Oh, honey, if you’ve been bitten by a dead thing hard enough to draw blood, in a time where antibiotics don’t exist, wrapping the wound isn’t going to do any good.

 

pp. 180–90   Joseph went to town to see a cryptozoologist, except the word cryptozoology was first used in the 1960s. Wonder if the scientist is the time traveler who slipped Sophie her book about cryptids.

 

If the deal between Matthias Argenton and the monster is for the bodies of the Argentons, why do the servants get eaten too? And how in god’s name do they keep finding more staff? They don’t get the benefit of the wealth and luck that the Argentons have bargained for, but they still keep bringing new spouses into the house of horrors and having kids and getting eaten—and executing each other when commanded to, if Rose’s orders are any example—but in four centuries not a one of them has run away? Sophie is supposedly freed from the bond if Joseph dies; what’s keeping the servants on site?

 

p. 245            No, a lake full of fish with the occasional corpse floating around in it from time to time is not safe to drink from, what the fuck is wrong with these people? Yes, Uncle Garrett says, it’s safe. Sophie fills a flask and drinks the fetid water. She’s fine. She may not be the genius Joseph thinks she is, but clearly she’s physically indestructible. Maybe Joseph should have just given her a weapon and fed her to the house monster—she’d probably have been able to destroy it from within.

 

Wait, if the Argentons have a carriage and horses, why didn’t Joseph take his own carriage to town when he set off to find himself a bride to sacrifice? Why aren’t the horses in the stables frightened of the house when the ones that brought Sophie to Northwood were terrified? How do Joseph and Sophie reach town so quickly in the Northwood carriage when it took Joseph six hours on horseback and, before that, days for Sophie to travel the same distance in a hired carriage?

The concept of the story is interesting, and while the device of the house bleeding on Sophie may have been adapted from The Shining, its eeriness is effective. It’s a shame that the publisher doesn’t seem to have bothered with any sort of developmental or copy editing, or even a proofreader (I lost track of the number of errant hyphens). The insistence on keeping the time and place of the story vague is pointless, frustrating, and very awkward. People call places they’re familiar with by name, they don’t say “the town” or “the city” every time; Joseph’s inability to do so makes it seem like he’s affected by some strange form of very selective amnesia. The narrative is riddled with little inconsistencies (aside from the two most glaring ones about how long it takes to travel between “the town” and Northwood and why the servants don’t just leave when they’re not bound by the curse). Rose is described repeatedly as having “dead eyes”, but she also uses her eyes to show a lot of emotion, especially when she’s angry with Sophie. After the fire Joseph needs medical attention but then refuses to let the doctor look at him and has no difficulty moving or making decisions. And, of course, there are several mentions of words and other things that didn’t exist when we didn’t have indoor plumbing or electricity (or even gas light fixtures), which is why, I suppose, the time and place are kept so deliberately vague. The problem is that these features don’t add to the atmosphere, they just make the clumsiness of the writing more distracting.

Clearly my library’s recommendation algorithm is not the greatest. One out of five stars. Read these instead—far more compelling characters, writers not afraid to set a scene in a specific time and place, and some with far more effective body horror, if that’s your thing:

 Melissa Albert, The Hazel Wood                                   Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Mexican Gothic

Alexis Henderson, The Year of the Witching             Jess Kidd, Things in Jars

Laura Purcell, The Silent Companions                          Joanna Van Veen, Blood on Her Tongue

Nicole Jarvis, The Lights of Prague                                Rosalie M. Lin, Daughter of Calamity

Nghi Vo, The Chosen and the Beautiful                       Lauren Owen, The Quick