It’s about what happens when we have that sort of anger inside of us, and are trained/taught/forced to hide it, to pretend it doesn’t exist.
It’s about other sorts of anger, too-anger that’s immediately expressed in a violent reaction, anger that is bottled-up and quietly simmering, anger that is an undercurrent, a constant state of being.
It’s very much about grief, and the intersection of grief and anger. But Gothic it is, with an atmospheric, creaky old house, generations of family secrets, push-pull relationships, big emotions that characters try to keep tamped down and hidden, and weirdly beautiful dilapidation and decay. I didn’t pick it up because it’s a Gothic, because I didn’t know it was a Gothic-that just ended up being a bonus. (As you may have gathered from the subject line on this issue, I’m going to be covering some more spooky Maine stories in the near future.) I picked this one up for a few reasons-I loved Leno’s Summer of Salt from 2018, I adored the cover art, and it’s a horror story set in Maine. No one has lived there for years, but it’s not empty. They aren’t the only ones with secrets: The house has them, too. She deflects Jane’s questions about the house, steers conversations with locals away from certain topics, sends Jane away when a conversation about the past is inescapable. Ruth, meanwhile, remains tight-lipped about her childhood.
And after the move, she starts noticing that sometimes she’s losing time even when she’s not angry. When she’s angry, really angry, sometime she loses time-she comes out of it and realizes that she’s done things that she doesn’t remember doing. Jane and Ruth are both grieving, both still coming to terms with the fact that they’re basically broke, both trying their damnedest to take care of one another, pick up the pieces of their lives, and move forward.ĭespite their deep love for one another, both of them have secrets.įor years, Jane has secretly self-soothed her moments of uncontrollable, blinding rage by slowly eating the pages of her most beloved books. After the sudden death of her father, Jane and her mother move from California to her mother’s childhood home in a small town in Maine.
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