11/21/2022
This unsettling historical novel from Biddle (author of the Martha Beale mystery series) pursues themes of secrets and sexual repression in a fictional New England village in 1962. Midwesterner Mabel Gorne arrives in the picturesque town of North Chesterfield, Mass., to attend graduate school at Mt. Simmons College. She rents a room in the home of Ruth and Henry Alston, middle-aged pillars of the community who stand in as parents and seem to offer the stability she craves. But ominous foreshadowing suggests trouble is bubbling under the surface in the Alstons’ home: “Up until the very end, seemed as rational as the town in which he dwelled.” Mabel harbors secrets of her own, including an affaire de coeur with a local policeman and a past she hopes to overcome. The tangle of small-town secrets unravels at the novel’s violent end.
Amid a vividly evoked milieu of elegance and decay, Biddle’s characters harbor dark secrets that drive the storytelling of the omniscient (and somewhat detached) narrator—and invite readers to speculate and never get too comfortable. Upstanding businessman Henry is actually a peeping Tom discovering that he harbors a cruel streak; his Puritan-stock wife, Ruth, masks her inhibitions behind a store of wholesome aphorisms. Ruth’s oldest friend, a spinster librarian, brims with delusional desire. Anthropology graduate student Mabel acts like a naïve, kittenish stereotype, oblivious to the menace that her landlord’s hand on her knee signifies.
But Mabel will reveal more depth than the rest, plus a past that will jolt readers, as Biddle applies her skill for suspense storytelling to this tangled drama alive with yearning, duplicity, and revelations—all that readers crave in a lushly written novel tinged with the gothic, where even a drive through the woods is sumptuous and creepy: “An odor of leaf mold and rotting bark, mushroom spores and grubs in hiding rushed through the windows while the view turned dark and creamy as night.”
Takeaway: A New England gothic where dark secrets rule a family’s lives.
Great for fans of: Susan Scarf Merrell’s Shirley, Cynthia Swanson’s The Glass Forest.
Production grades Cover: A Design and typography: A Illustrations: N/A Editing: A Marketing copy: A
2022-10-21
In this novel, a female graduate student becomes an object of desire.
The year is 1962. The young women who flock to the small New England town of North Chesterfield to attend Mt. Simmons College come mostly from well-to-do families—they live on monthly allowances, vacation in Europe, and date boys who go to Harvard and Yale. Mabel Gorne is everything they are not: Midwestern, mysterious, and shabby in a way that suggests disinterested old money. She’s come to Mt. Simmons to pursue graduate studies in anthropology, but she quickly acquires a collection of younger acolytes: “Mabel was ‘unique…special… singular,’ or ‘un symbole du raffinement’ to the Francophiles….Whether she understood the spell she cast or not, the fact remains that the spell was very real.” She boards in the grand Victorian home of respectable local couple Ruth and Henry Alston, who also swiftly grow enamored of her—particularly Henry, who spies on Mabel through a peephole in her bedroom wall. Mabel does have a few secrets, including those involving her nighttime trysts with local assistant constable Jim Flaherty. But it turns out that the unspoken desires of those around her may prove to have just as strong a pull on her destiny as anything in her past. Biddle’s stylish prose perfectly captures the mid-20th-century setting in all its repressed isolation: “Dressed in a nylon slip and nothing more, Mabel sat beside an open bedroom window in the Windsor Haven Hotel. A pair of sepia-patterned curtains shielded her from the road below and the passersby strolling Main Street….She experienced a sense of peril as compelling as any she’d known. It was like climbing the catwalk on a railroad bridge.” The sentences sing, and every creaky room of the Alston house becomes a stage for suspenseful encounters. It’s a compact story, leaping back and forth between a handful of rich interiorities, and readers will be delighted to journey with the characters into the darkness of their hidden lives.
A short, captivating tale of unwanted attention.
