Archive for the ‘Gothic’ Category

YOUR PRESENCE IS REQUESTED AT SUVANTO by Maile Chapman

Nestled in the pristine Finnish woods is a sanatorium for women. It’s the 1920s and medicine and its accompanying attitudes towards women’s health is moving from Victorian ideas to more modern methods of treatment, but those shifts have not yet reached the women’s hospital at Suvanto. This vast multistoried building is still part spa for the wealthy wives of the male employees for the local timber company, and part hospital for the poor. This is a building with sharp physical and mental divisions between staff and patients and also between the patients themselves. The poor patients–those who are considered “really” ill are kept on the bottom floors, while the convalescing wives of the timber employees, called the “up-patients” lodge on the 5th floor.

July 15, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , ,  · Posted in: Contemporary, Debut Novel, Finland, Gothic, Mental Health, Mystery/Suspense, Unique Narrative

THE WINTER GHOSTS by Kate Mosse

Mosse gives her beguiling novel an old fashioned gothic framework that suits this eerie story of ghostly love in an insular mountain village of France a decade after WWI. The story opens in 1933 as Frederick Watson visits an antiquarian bookseller in Toulouse. “He walked like a man recently returned to the world. Every step was careful, deliberate. Every step to be relished.” Well-dressed and confident, Watson knows his appearance contrasts sharply with his last visit to Toulouse in 1928 at age 25. “He had been another man then, a tattered man, worn threadbare by grief.”

July 10, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , , , ,  · Posted in: 2011 Favorites, France, Gothic, Mystery/Suspense, Psychological Suspense, Time Period Fiction

WITCHES ON THE ROAD TONIGHT by Sheri Holman

Witches on the Road Tonight by Sheri Holman is a tale of intergenerational witches that takes place in four different time frames between the 1930’s and the present. The plot moves back and forth between generations and characters. This requires a bit of concentration, but is well worth the effort. It has something of the fears that rise from ghost stories told around a campfire.

March 3, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , ,  · Posted in: Gothic, Horror, Reading Guide, Speculative (Beyond Reality), US South

INSTRUMENTS OF DARKNESS by Imogen Robertson

Imogen Robertson’s INSTRUMENTS OF DARKNESS is set in the village of Hartswood, West Sussex, at a time when the colonies were waging war against England. The male protagonist, the brusque Gabriel Crowther, is an eccentric and a recluse who has a wide-ranging knowledge of and interest in human anatomy. One day, a local woman, Mrs. Harriet Westerman of Caveley Park, pays him a visit and insists that his maid give him the following note: “I have found a body on my land. His throat has been cut.”

February 27, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , ,  · Posted in: Facing History, Gothic, Mystery/Suspense, Time Period Fiction, United Kingdom

THE CYPRESS HOUSE by Michael Koryta

In Koryta’s latest thriller – noir with a twist of the supernatural – it’s late summer 1935 and a group of hard-bitten WWI veterans and one talented 19-year-old are headed for the Florida Keys to build a highway bridge.

January 24, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , , , , , ,  · Posted in: Florida, Gothic, Noir, Real Event Fiction, Thriller/Spy/Caper

THE CASEBOOK OF VICTOR FRANKENSTEIN by Peter Ackroyd

Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus in 1818, and it stands as a classic marker of the intersection between the Romantic and Industrial Ages. The most superficial aspect of her idea — a being created from human corpses by the use of electricity that turns out to be a monster — has been transformed by Hollywood into a cliché of the horror genre. Yet Mary Shelley’s original work has profound moral and philosophical implications that shed a great deal of light on the thought of the time, and are relevant in many respects to debates in our own age, such as cloning and stem-cell research. Peter Ackroyd’s retelling of the story might seem superfluous, except that for modern readers it manages to cut even closer to the heart of what made the original novel so important, not least in its pitch-perfect evocation of early 19th-century style and intellectual portrait of the age.

December 11, 2010 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , ,  · Posted in: Award Winning Author, Gothic, Reading Guide, Real People Fiction, Time Period Fiction