The Grave

The Grave
Charles L. Grant | Fawcett Popular Library | 1981 | 223 pages

Joshua Miller finds things. Not missing persons, or stolen jewels, or anything of particular value or notoriety, but items of interest desired for some personal reason by a group of select clients in the small Connecticut town of Oxrun Station. The search for a seemingly innocuous 18th-century hand plow, The Grave’s version of a Hitchcockian MacGuffin, leads Miller to uncover a secret that someone wants to remain hidden, and sets off a series of uncanny events that leaves him questioning his own sanity.

The aftermath of a strange accident introduces an early mystery, although Miller is not directly involved in the proceedings. A violent car crash on a lonely stretch of road outside the town claims the lives of four passengers. However, among the four corpses alongside the wreckage, police find an extraneous severed arm, the only remains of a purported fifth victim whose body is never found. Although this curious puzzle fires Miller’s imagination, he continues on with his own caseload, searching for a historic plow, a sheaf of vintage sheet music, and other more mundane items.

Although the writing is full of descriptive details—the overstuffed decor of a wealthy woman’s library, the components of a finely prepared dinner, or the simple pleasures of a warm bath—mundane proves to be the key word. A full ten more chapters unfold, with the crash receding in the background, until a new mysterious element is introduced. Mrs. Thames, Miller’s primary client, eventually confides in him her own fears regarding a strange series of disappearances.

Several women in her circle of friends have all gone missing. The individual circumstances vary, but the missing persons share a similar characteristic—they all vanished on their birthday. Although she does not understand the forces at play, with her own birthday fast approaching, she is terrified she may be next on the list.

Miller humors Mrs. Thames, but several distractions keep him from investigating the rash of birthday disappearances. In fact, nearly the entire first half of the novel reads more like the foundation of a romance than a horror story, with Miller at one corner of a latent love triangle. The main problem with this focus is the fact Miller is something of a jerk.

He harbors a deep attraction to Andrea Murdoch, the sheltered yet voluptuous daughter of a local writer, living in isolation with her father in a remote farmhouse outside of town. Her breathy interchanges with Miller leave him stricken with desire, but crippled with an impotence to act upon his feelings. At the same time, his flirtatious banter and intimate behaviour with Felicity Lancaster, his employee at the detective agency, easily crosses contemporary boundaries of inappropriate workplace behaviour. His attitude towards her ranges from a patronizing creepiness to blatant harassment.

It all serves to fuel a slow burn suspense, but there is a qualitative difference between slow burn and no burn. A few eerie incidents hint at the supernatural, with the atmosphere of the town suggesting a building storm, whether electrical or psychological. Miller overhears an argument between Andrea’s father and a strange old woman inside the farmhouse, a wasp-induced panic attack fuels a resurgence of a childhood trauma, and Miller almost drowns in the bath during a visionary experience as the curved sides of the tub recede upwards and out of reach.

The pace doesn’t really pick up until near the end, after Miller is nearly killed in an hallucination-fueled accident. The attempt on his life arguably proves itself unnecessary during the events of the climax. Even while the villain explains the motives behind his actions, Miller clearly does not possess all the answers that would have made him a threat. Another character, who is unceremoniously killed off-page, actually posits the initial theory that ties all the pieces of the mystery together.

The underlying lore also remains sketchy, as if deemed unnecessary in the rush to a conclusion. This final omission is particularly glaring, given the wealth of incidental details on other matters along the way. Yet the final rituals and source of related powers remain vague.

Author Charles L. Grant was a notable proponent of “quiet horror”, and set nearly a dozen novels and a host of short stories in the extended Oxrun Station universe. Although possessing a modestly enjoyable overall atmosphere of suspense, the place-specific charms of Oxrun Station in The Grave fail to inspire much enthusiasm for a return visit.

[On a technical (and somewhat petulant) note, the title should more accurately read The Graves, since there are at least nine in the story.]

Dark Shadows (Dark Shadows #1)

Dark Shadows (Dark Shadows #1)
Marilyn Ross | Paperback Library | 1966 | 159 pages

The first installment of the long-running Dark Shadows novelizations by Marilyn Ross occupies a space similar to the “Parallel Time” storylines in the television series. Faces and touchstone plot points may seem familiar, although perhaps slightly uncanny, but entirely new character arcs are revealed, and new developments steer events in unexpected directions.

Victoria Winters arrives at Collins House (rather than “Collinwood”) to serve as its new governess, escaping the foundling home of her childhood. She hopes her new employer, Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, may have some information regarding her own family history. The Collinswood—er, Collins House—matriarch is the regal, somewhat icily detached, figure viewers of the daytime drama will recognize. Elizabeth hasn’t left the estate in eighteen years, since the disappearance of her husband, and makes secret trips to the cellar, but in the true spirit of parallel time, not for the previously understood reason. Her brother, Roger Collins, is portrayed here as a louche drunk, separated from his wife and responsible for chasing off the previous governess with his untoward advances. His son David, ostensibly the reason for Victoria’s arrival, is mostly neglected, his monstrous antics of the series mercifully reduced. Elizabeth’s daughter, Caroline, is the bubbly teen frustrated by her isolation in the old family mansion, escaping to the amenities of the local bar scene at the Blue Whale. Another member of the Collins family fully captures Victoria’s interest, serving as her potential love interest and firmly centering him in the melodrama to come: Ernest Collins.

Of course, puzzled fans of the daytime drama will undoubtedly ask, “Who the hell is Ernest Collins?”

Ernest Collins, Elizabeth and Roger’s cousin, is a violin virtuoso, whose life took a tragic turn with the loss of his wife in a car accident. After returning to Collins House a few years later, he began a nascent romance with a talented young artist whose own life would end under tragic, and possibly mysterious circumstances. Dark Shadows #1 is essentially Victoria and Ernest’s story, a gothic romance set among the trappings of greater Collins lore.

Victoria Winters guides us through a funhouse of gothic tropes and old-dark-house scares: the creepy old mansion with its closed off rooms and secret passages, the extended family, each harboring their own possible dark secrets, and the brooding love interest, who may or may not be a murderer. The dialogue often tends toward the prosaic, matched with lazy character depictions—Elizabeth is repeatedly described as the “older woman” and Ernest the “young violinist”. Eventually the plot kicks in again, placing Victoria in another dangerous situation.

Like other protagonists in popular gothic fiction, Victoria Winters stretches the credibility of answering the question, “How many attempts on your life does it take for you to leave?” Early in her stay at Collins House, she suffers a nasty blow to the head while exploring the dark cellar under an abandoned wing of the house, and later survives a runaway car crash on the winding road leading from the estate after the steering system fails. All along, she remains true to the goal of saving her tortured Ernest, ultimately fighting another battle for her life in the dramatic climax waged on the roof of Collins House during a blustery storm.

Burke Devlin, a love interest for Victoria and foil to Roger Collins in the television series, is another key character introduced only in passing here. With Ernest’s story seemingly resolved, it remains to be seen if his mention portends a return to the main storyline in the second installment of the novels, Victoria Winters.

Ice

Ice
Anna Kavan | Popular Library | 1974 | 207 pages

A slippery treatise on all-consuming obsession and desire masquerading as apocalyptic science fiction, Ice exposes its protagonist’s unreliable nature early in the narrative, declaring his chronic suffering from headaches and insomnia and the resulting “horrible dreams” from prescribed medication.

The unnamed narrator returns to his hometown after a long absence, driven by a desire to see a girl whose affection was ultimately lost to a romantic rival. After a childhood of abuse from a sadistic mother, the girl (also unnamed but repeatedly referred to as “fragile” and “glass-like”) now lives trapped in an unhappy marriage, but does not relish the visit from her former suitor. Upon his arrival, she flees both men, escaping into an unknown future.

Against this broken love triangle, a strange climatic change unfolds over the town. An advance of ice and snow flurries marks the arrival of an unnatural cold season, driving polar weather across the country. Although details are not forthcoming, speculation suggests the pervasive temperature change is the result of some undetermined man-made event, perhaps nuclear in origin. News, it seems, is also not to be trusted.

The narrator sets off in pursuit of the girl, but his intentions are far from noble. His own recurring dreams and fantasies do not revolve around her rescue and potential rehabilitation, but objectify her as a delicate object to be bruised by his touch. His own sense of reality seems to blur between dream and fantasy, with descriptions of the advance of kaleidoscopic sheets of ice. These fantastic visions sometimes accompany specific, first-hand descriptions of the girl’s flight, details the narrator could not possibly possess.

Booking international passage on a freighter to a city on a fjord, the narrator witnesses the girl fall under the control of another man, a blue-eyed brute who ultimately becomes known as “the warden”. The relationship between the three establishes the motif for the entire novel.

A travelogue of sorts ensues, sending the narrator through a string of various gray and ruined port cities, following the ephemeral trail of the girl and the various incarnations of the warden, who is by turn, city official, guerrilla fighter, or head of state. The girl remains passive, however, a frightened captive of her powerful keeper, but suspicious and afraid of the relentless advances made by the narrator.

Fractured sheets of mountainous ice continue to advance, laying waste to countries and precipitating civil wars, as the narrator keeps one step ahead of the tightening circle of glacial masses. He crosses frontiers and books passage to the next port of call in an attempt to confront the warden and take possession of the girl. But how literal is this world?

And does the warden even really exist?

The girl flatly states how closely she views the intentions of both warden and narrator, shrinking and withering from the touch of both. Beyond acknowledging a growing, brother-like affinity towards the warden, blurring the boundaries between them, the narrator himself experiences a near body-switch, briefly occupying the warden’s body and experiencing a direct point-of-view from behind his icy blue eyes.

Ice ultimately answers no questions, but instead posits a rather dark view of human relations, characterized by perpetual cycles of control and victimhood. Its troubled characters occupy a greater, fatalistic world, one that traps its inhabitants in an existence beyond their influence, with no redemptive path out—perhaps save for a final relief hinted at by a gun stashed in the glovebox of a car.

Fog Island Horror

Fog Island Horror
Marilyn Ross | Popular Library | 1978 | 221 pages

Never remotely reaching the promised “horror’ in its title, this entry in the loose series of Fog Island novels has all the elements of a gothic potboiler—scheming relatives, an unsolved murder case, secrets buried in a closed-off cellar, mysterious monster sightings—but languishes in a mostly undeveloped state until a fatal struggle on the precipice of some storm-drenched cliffs triggers the final resolution.

A chance encounter with Charles Trent leads Rachel Blair to a position as a companion to his aunt, the ailing family matriarch on their estate on Fog Island. To help ease the elderly woman’s deteriorating mental condition, Charles convinces Rachel to assume the role of Lydia’s granddaughter, also named Rachel, who disappeared along with her father following the shocking (and unsolved) murder of her mother twenty years previously. Of course, Charles’ initial altruistic motive quickly becomes suspect as his potential gain in an inheritance ploy comes to light, and his friendly demeanor towards Rachel degenerates into open belligerence.

The decades-old murder mystery simmers in the background, with a number of possible suspects still in the picture at Trent Manor. The household gardener, the family doctor, and even the invalid neighbor all fall under suspicion. Rachel herself even glimpses the local legend, a monster haunting the desolate coves near the estate, whom she begins to believe is Lydia’s missing son, returned to the scene of the crime and hiding somewhere in the boarded up sections of the mansion.

However, Rachel never seems in any immediate danger, and events on Fog Island fail to deliver much in the way of any surprises. Charles remains a heel, the old neighbor’s dashing son becomes an obligatory love interest, and Rachel Blair slowly begins to suspect she is the lost Rachel Trent after all.

Although Rachel develops something akin to a family bond with Lydia—arguably committing her to seeing through the underlying mystery of Trent Manor—her perfunctory engagement undermines any budding suspense. If she so chooses, Rachel could escape with her betrothed, James Duncan, who is so tenaciously above reproach that it’s difficult to even pose the standard genre question asked of the heroine’s romantic partner, “Is he a secret villain?”

The Witches of Windlake

The Witches of Windlake
Miriam Lynch | Popular Library | 1971 | 287 pages

After impulsively accepting a position as governess to the Louvayne family, the reclusive new occupants of long-abandoned Windlake mansion, Jennie Maxwell finds herself embroiled in an infernal battle-of-the-wills for possession of her young ward.

Jennie immediately falls for the romantic charms of darkly brooding Victor Louvayne, newly arrived from some vaguely defined Eastern European country along with his mother, Ottalie, and young son, Julian. Victor and his mother are reluctant to speak of the tragic death of Victor’s wife, Franzi, and become visibly shaken after hearing Jennie recount her recent tarot card reading. Beyond foretelling her great turn of fortune at the hands of a “dark man and woman,” the cards promise “three women and an unexpected arrival.”

Indeed, a trio of women does arrive unexpectedly at Windlake–or perhaps to the Louvaynes, not as unexpectedly as foretold. Like some gothic romance variation on Macbeth’s three weird sisters, Franzi’s mother, Josepha Hanar, and two sisters, Lenya and Ilse, descend upon the manor after chasing the Louvaynes across the Atlantic. Of course, they are also witches, immediately emasculating Victor and sending Ottalie into a resigned compliance. The Hanar women barely contain their scorn for Jennie, and openly challenge her for control over Julian.

Julian, a treacly darling smitten with Jennie, is also something of a petulant child, subject to uncontrollable temper tantrums and in need of complicated story-telling games to coerce his actions. Jennie alternates between convincing him to role play in these games and violently yanking his collar when apoplexy strikes. Perhaps Julian’s aggressively childish behavior should be forgiven, however, because….Satan.

Jennie herself pauses on occasion to reflect upon the inherent creepiness of her latent romance with Victor. Objectively, he seduces an employee who bears an uncanny resemblance to his late wife, dresses her in his late wife’s clothing, and sets her up in the role of replacement mother for his neglected child. Even after collapsing in the face of the Hanar danger and placing all hope in her to save Julian, he caressingly refers to her as “little Jennie” and promises to take charge of the family after they are married.

A New England blizzard helps contain the suspense, trapping all the players in Windlake for the witches’ nightly cycle of occult ritual followed by attempts on Jennie’s life. Disappointingly, Jennie’s supernatural potential hinted at by the tarot cards turns out to be…the power of prayer? After functioning as something of a missionary to Julian, the anger of the Hanar women boils into a rage that turns against all in the household.

Still, the reductive tale of a plucky young heroine engaged in battle with a trio of smug witches–and their vermin-like familiars–in a frozen New England mansion may be enough for a little seasonal gothic comfort.

The Landlady

The Landlady
Constance Rauch | Popular Library | 1976 | 253 pages

Leaving behind a series of failed jobs in the city, Sam Porter moves his wife, Jessica, and young daughter, Patience, into a charming old apartment in Wimbledon-on-Hudson. However, the family’s dream of a new life in the suburbs meets an unexpected obstacle in the form of Mrs. Falconer, the intrusive crone of a landlady living upstairs.

On the night of the family’s arrival, the small village is stunned by the shocking murder of Nora Kelly, a nearly retired accounting clerk at the offices of a company partially owned by Sam’s new employer. After his first day on the job, Sam returns to some of his bad habits, losing several hours over drinks at the local pub. Meanwhile, Jessica meets another young mother who warns her of the psychological games Mrs. Falconer has played on previous tenants.

Jessica herself finds that doting Mrs. Falconer’s superficial politeness occasionally gives way to apoplectic anger. Popping down to check on the young mother, the old woman rages at discovering nails pounded in the wall, and tears down one of the child’s drawings. The simple awareness of the landlady’s constant presence upstairs becomes a nagging source of unease for Jessica.

Already alarmed at discovering a previously unknown connecting stairway between the apartments, Jessica is horrified when Patience claims that a strange man entered her room at night and stole her doll. The formerly talkative and precocious two-year-old begins to exhibit signs of emotional regression, lapsing into a nearly complete silence. Fearing that Mrs. Falconer is behind the intrusion into her home, Jessica listens for the constant tap-tap-tap of the old woman’s cane on the floorboards upstairs.

Touted as “the greatest terror turn-on since Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist” on the cover, The Landlady delivers a treatise on Sam and Jessica’s failing marriage rather than terror. Jessica’s battles with Mrs. Falconer along with Sam’s seeming inability to hold a job (and sobriety) create an emotional strain that threatens to tear their family apart. Sam begins to spend more hours, and occasionally entire nights, at the office, shaking the foundation of their marriage—and leaving Jessica alone to face a series of strange events, culminating in a trip up the connecting staircase.

The creeping sense of intrusion into personal space, coupled with the background details surrounding the local murder, builds an atmosphere of dread around Jessica. However, the introduction of the evidence of child abuse completely sours the enjoyment of the mystery, adding an unnecessary and distasteful subtext to the horrors at Wimbledon-on-Hudson.

Although compromised by the implications of real-world abuses, the fundamentally terrifying question remains, “What’s going on next door?”

We Have Always Lived in the Castle

We Have Always Lived in the Castle
Shirley Jackson | Popular Library | 1963 | 173 pages

Merricat, said Connie, would you like a cup of tea?
Oh, no, said Merricat, you’ll poison me.
Merricat, said Connie, would you like to go to sleep?
Down in the boneyard ten feet deep!

Sisters Mary Katherine and Constance Blackwood, along with their invalid uncle Julian, live alone in the isolated Blackwood family estate. Ostracized by the local community, Mary Katherine only ventures into town twice a week for groceries, while her sister has withdrawn completely into the interior of the great house. The three are the only survivors of a notorious unsolved multiple murder, a poisoning that, six years earlier, claimed the lives of Mary Katherine and Constance’s mother, father, aunt, and younger brother.

The details of the fateful day are not immediately forthcoming, as the daily routine at the Blackwood house takes shape. Mary Katherine exhibits a penchant for burying small tokens around the grounds of the estate, talismans to ward off bad luck, while her sister only leaves the house to tend to her vegetable garden. The only tenuous connection to life in the town is Helen Clarke, a self-purported friend of the family who visits for tea on Tuesdays.

The full realization of the community’s hostile attitude toward the Blackwood sisters comes home during the polite artifice of one of these visits. Uncle Julian, confined to a wheelchair and suffering mental confusion after surviving the arsenic poisoning at the family dinner, bluntly addresses Mrs. Wright, a quizzical old woman brought along by Mrs. Clarke, “My niece, after all, was acquitted of murder. There could be no possible danger in visiting here now.” While Mrs. Clarke’s tea and rum cake sit untouched, Julian recounts how Constance prepared the fatal meal with ingredients from her garden—and proceeded to immediately wash out the sugar bowl after serving.

The tea party is not, however, the greatest intrusion into the hermetically sealed world of the Blackwood sisters. The unexpected arrival of their cousin Charles, who shows great interest in the value of their possessions—and the contents of the safe in the family study—disrupts the internal workings of the house. Pressing Constance to forget her dark past, shake off her reclusive social withdrawal, and re-engage with the outside world, Charles threatens to destroy the fabric of life at Blackwood house. His growing animosity towards Mary Katherine–who lashes out with childish acts of destruction aimed at his growing influence–along with the burgeoning resentment of the townspeople, eventually lead towards a devastating, inevitable climax.

Merricat displays a brilliant insistence upon rituals, safe words, and place in the family lore, but nearly all that is important is left unspoken. Only uncle Julian, barely competent in his current state, comments on the details of the murders, collecting a rambling written rumination on the circumstances and existing evidence in a shamble of loose papers. Much later, Constance delivers a dramatic shock when she finally voices a simple truth about the crime.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle, while arguably less well known than The Haunting of Hill House, is less an outright mystery or horror, but rather a compelling, melancholic character study of a blighted house and its occupants.

An origin story to a future urban myth, it dares neighborhood children to climb the porch (past the broken step) of the haunted house and invoke, “Merricat, would you like a cup of tea?”

The Sound of Midnight

The Sound of Midnight
Charles L. Grant | Popular Library | 1978 | 221 pages

Following the shocking drowning death of one of her young customers, toy-store owner Dale Bartlett plunges into a supernatural conspiracy in her small town of Oxrun Station.

Happening upon a horrific scene during her lunch break at the town pond, Dale discovers a ring of children standing around the drowned corpse of Willy Campbell. The police seem strangely suspicious of her account, and seem to hint at something other than an accidental drowning. Returning to her store, Dale finds a strange note, possibly left earlier that morning, “Please be in the park today so I can see you and tell you something.”

Dale later witnesses another horrible tragedy involving the Campbell family. After dropping off a hand-carved chess set for Dale to sell in her store, Willy’s father, Dave, is killed in an unusually explosive, singe-car crash across the street from her shop window. Following the accident, Dale discovers another note left for her on the counter, “Miss Bartlett, we missed you at the park.”

Dale and her fiancé Vic, responding to a strange remark made from Dave Campbell just before his death concerning the mythology of the chess figures he carved, begin an investigation to uncover the cause of the growing number of deadly incidents plaguing their small town. An amusing reflection on the (now seemingly unthinkable) days before the Internet, their investigation begins in the card catalogue at the local library–probably under “O” for “Occult”. Paging through piles of mythological tomes on the library tables, they begin to grasp the supernatural forces at work.

Flirting with some familiar themes involving sinister children and pagan rituals, The Sound of Midnight delivers enough evil-lurking-in-the-small-town genre thrills to sustain an atmosphere of dread. Dale’s paranoia is fueled by children’s misbehavior towards her elderly shop assistant, unusually harried and subservient parents in town, and repeated visits from, what should have been, grieving family members. Ultimately, a fear of newcomers underlines the story, with the (relatively) new arrivals in town interrupting the staid atmosphere of the established townspeople, their old beliefs providing the source of terror in an otherwise homogeneous New England community.

A weak attempt at a “Gotcha!” ending invokes the specter of Carrie White referenced in the cover’s blurb (“A pack of children more horrifying than CARRIE!”). Instead of a dead hand thrusting free from beneath the grave, a small hand reveals a hidden chess piece, but the standard give-them-one-last-shock message remains the same—Dear God, no, it’s not over!

Keys of Hell

Keys of Hell
Louise Osborne | Popular Library | 1975 | 254 pages

Gathering with a group of psychic-phenomenon students at a reputedly haunted house, journalist Gwen Carroll experiences a ghostly warning from her deceased godmother. At the same time as Gwen’s spectral encounter, another member of the group, Nonnie Richards, blacks out and channels the spirit of a murder victim from the house’s dark history. Later, Professor Robert Wildfield, the leader of the seminar and expert in the study of the occult, informs Gwen that she and Nonnie are quite possibly latent psychics, who could grow and develop their natural powers with the right training.

After establishing its supernatural premise, the ghostly narrative dissipates into a more mundane family melodrama. Gwen discovers that Nonnie and her young daughter, Laura, live in her building, and are on the run from Nonnie’s estranged husband and domineering mother-in-law. After an attempt is made to grab Laura, Gwen invites the mother and daughter to move into her apartment. The pair hide out with Gwen until Nonnie receives an unexpected letter from her uncle, Ben Potter, a writer of supernatural fiction living in France. Ben plans on returning to Canada to live at Lion’s Head, a remote old estate on the lake shore. He ultimately invites Nonnie and Laura to move in with him—along with Gwen, hired as his live-in secretary.

But Lion’s Head does not provide the sanctuary that it promises. Nonnie suffers from a recurring nightmare of being sacrificed on a marble altar, while Ben discovers a strange old chapel on the grounds of the estate, seemingly abandoned but in a state of current repair. Researching the history of Lion’s Head, he learns that the wife of the estate’s former owner committed suicide in the chapel, hanging herself from the rafters. When the body of an apparent victim of an occult ritual washes up on the beach, Professor Wildfield warns Gwen that a satanic cult may be performing black arts in the area. And what possible hold does Nicolas Dessaix, a darkly magnetic stranger living in the nearby motel, have over Nonnie?

A mishmash of genre ingredients, Keys of Hell suffers from a lack of vision regarding its own identity. Does it want to be a ghost story (or stories), psychic tale, child-in-danger family drama, occult thriller, or a hippie horror with a cult of murderous followers? The discovery of tunnels under the house leading to the beach even alludes to (without ever developing) a standard smuggling operation subplot. Gwen’s own distance from the danger saps much of the tension, since she is really only proxy to the jeopardy faced by Nonnie and Laura. Gwen even keeps the lease on her old apartment, providing her a possible escape route from the deadly confines of Lion’s Head.

The spirit of Gwen’s godmother, Maude Jessop, provides a consistent thread from the haunted house opening to the inevitable wedding epilogue, offering dubious advice at times of crisis—unsurprisingly, perhaps, given her own personal history as a failed missionary mutilated by the natives she was attempting to convert.

Fool’s Proof

Fool’s Proof
Alberta Simpson Carter | Popular Library | 1975 | 256 pages

Following a whirlwind courtship, young New York editor Haila Gorham marries David Roche, a charmingly self-assured, blue-eyed man she met at a party on Riverside Drive. David insists upon taking Haila to meet his family at Wildemont, their estate on remote Rock Island, a popular tourist destination in the summer months, but now a deserted group of boarded up houses and deserted storefronts. During the trip, Haila is unable to shake a persistent feeling of dread, and senses an undiscovered cruelty hiding beneath David’s perfectly sunny disposition.

To her barely-concealed horror, Haila discovers that Wildemont Estate is an architectural monstrosity, a jumbled abomination whose malevolence has seeped into the lives of its residents. David’s parents are cold and distant from their children, lost in an alcoholic fog, semi-oblivious to the verbal assaults from their daughter Gillian, who simmers with repressed anger. David’s brother Jack, although polite and well mannered, projects a dark magnetism that Haila finds disturbing, but also strangely attractive. Jack’s wife Lenore is a voluptuous beauty, whose movie-star glamour seems impossibly outsized for such a small resort town and its handful of year-round residents.

Haila is shocked when David coyly reveals that they will be leaving New York to reside with his family at Wildemont. But that shock is eclipsed by a story playing on the local news. Anton Freund, a local resident—and former friend of Gillian—convicted of murder in the bludgeoning deaths of several women, has escaped from custody and is thought to have returned home to Rock Island. The police’s theory is seemingly confirmed when a local girl is found murdered outside the bar where she worked, her head crushed in by a rock.

Fool’s Proof succeeds in generating suspense from its simple formula: trap a young heroine on a remote island estate with a husband she barely knows, mix with a family she fears cannot be trusted, then add an escaped murderer. Given its dark history, the accumulation of past (and present) tragic events at Wildemont advance an interesting theory of the power of architecture to influence and even drive human actions, without resorting to a literal haunting.

Although the identity of the “fool” and the nature of the “proof” in Fool’s Proof are enigmatic, the sudden romantic resolution at the finale suggests a clear life lesson—don’t let a pile of fresh corpses stand in the way of finding true love.

ruined head

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