Day 135: (possibly)
Tuesday, 4 August 2020 04:01 pmHow can it be August already? For a shapeless horror, its proportions all wrong, whose actual days are featureless and leaden, this year's monstrosity actually moves very fast. 2020: the wrong sort of zombie.
I am distracting myself extremely hard from work (first week of term and concomitant curriculum change nightmare, plus residual angst from performance review fuckery) by reading rather a lot. This week's discovery: the re-release on Kindle of a whole bunch of Joan Aiken's adult Gothic thrillers (Amazon page here, if only because I like the covers). I love Joan Aiken's kids' stuff, her fairy tales (Necklace of Raindrops et al, with the amazing Jan Pieńkowski silhouette art) and the alternate history series which starts with The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, and which I reviewed in more detail here.
Her adult Gothic is something else entirely. It's like the bastard love-child of Mary Stewart and Agatha Christie, with a dash of Edgar Allen Poe: domestic where Stewart is all exotic locations, atmospheric where Christie is clinical, and at times quite astonishingly lowering, threatening and claustrophobic. People do horrible things to other people in these books, as much manipulation as murder. Despite their comparatively modern setting they have a really sure sense of Gothic weather and place: the various houses are, properly for Gothic, very much characters in their own right. The slightly fey whimsy of the Dido series is almost entirely absent, although at least one of the adult novels shares with Dido's story the general correlation of musical ability with villainy. Somewhere in Joan Aiken's past a musician savaged her very badly.
You'd think that reading this sort of thing during lockdown in a pandemic would be counterintuitive, but in fact it's cathartic: there's something appropriate and resonant in the experience of these hedged, desperate heroines trying to escape their oncoming, inevitable doom. I feel you, sisters. Same.
I am distracting myself extremely hard from work (first week of term and concomitant curriculum change nightmare, plus residual angst from performance review fuckery) by reading rather a lot. This week's discovery: the re-release on Kindle of a whole bunch of Joan Aiken's adult Gothic thrillers (Amazon page here, if only because I like the covers). I love Joan Aiken's kids' stuff, her fairy tales (Necklace of Raindrops et al, with the amazing Jan Pieńkowski silhouette art) and the alternate history series which starts with The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, and which I reviewed in more detail here.
Her adult Gothic is something else entirely. It's like the bastard love-child of Mary Stewart and Agatha Christie, with a dash of Edgar Allen Poe: domestic where Stewart is all exotic locations, atmospheric where Christie is clinical, and at times quite astonishingly lowering, threatening and claustrophobic. People do horrible things to other people in these books, as much manipulation as murder. Despite their comparatively modern setting they have a really sure sense of Gothic weather and place: the various houses are, properly for Gothic, very much characters in their own right. The slightly fey whimsy of the Dido series is almost entirely absent, although at least one of the adult novels shares with Dido's story the general correlation of musical ability with villainy. Somewhere in Joan Aiken's past a musician savaged her very badly.
You'd think that reading this sort of thing during lockdown in a pandemic would be counterintuitive, but in fact it's cathartic: there's something appropriate and resonant in the experience of these hedged, desperate heroines trying to escape their oncoming, inevitable doom. I feel you, sisters. Same.