A bite-size Gothic delicacy

[bloodygranuaile]

 

Partly in an attempt to boost my Goodreads numbers by reading short things but also because several people said they were really, really good, I have started in on the sequels to Seanan McGuire’s Every Heart a Doorway. This weekend I finally got in the ebook for the second installment, Down Among the Sticks and Bones, the story of twin girls Jacqueline and Jillian and the Hammer Horror universe they wandered into. 

While this book was not strictly about Goths it was certainly extremely Goth, possibly even more Goth than the last one. The twins’ home life is freaking creepy, for starters, and the emotionally sterile environment has done a number on both of them psychologically by the time they, at 12 years old, stumble into the Moors. Due to some creepy pact, one of them has to go with the vampire that rules over most of the Moors and the other has to go with the mad scientist that lives in a windmill at the edge of the village. Surprising everyone except themselves, Jillian, the one who had been forced into the role of the tomboy at an early age, elects to go with the Master and become a waiflike vampire princess, and Jacqueline, who had been forced into the role of the quiet and obedient girly-girl, ditches her frilly dresses and goes off with the good doctor to become a mad scientist’s apprentice, wear pants, and become a lesbian. Despite my own fondness for long dresses and vampirism, it is clear to me that Jack is the sensible one and Jillian is stone cold insane. 

The story is at every turn atmospherically weird and creepy and unsettling, and it contains a lot of wonderfully unsettling exploration of how expectations shape people. In that, in the complex webs of submission and rebellion, of expectation and reaction, of love and predation, of allure and revulsion, it becomes an extremely Gothic story in the most classical sense. There are even two tall dark and brooding houses, one for each twin. My only regret about having zipped through this in one evening--mostly in the bath, because obviously--is that I can now no longer read it for the first time, I can only reread it and I don’t know if that’ll be as much fun. Otherwise, it was basically a perfect little devil’s food cupcake of a novella.