bloodygranuaile (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bloodygranuaile) wrote2025-01-27 02:12 pm
bloodygranuaile) wrote2025-01-27 02:12 pm
The writer's retreat from Hell
Recently two of my dear friends got married, and gave away books as wedding favors at their wedding. They had quite a lot of copies so Sam and I ended up with five books collectively instead of the traditional one apiece. One of these books was Rachel Hawkins’ The Villa, a dual-timeline novel about two childhood best friends, now both writers in their thirties, who take a girls’ trip to a villa in Italy where a very famous murder happened in the 1970s among a bunch of drugged-up rock star types. The crew in the ‘70s timeline are based off of the Romantic poets from the infamous summer in Lake Geneva, where Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, John Polidori wrote The Vampyre, Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley were insufferable to everybody (or at least that’s what I’ve heard), and Claire Clairmont was also there. Except, in this version, the Percy character, up-and-coming musician Pierce Sheldon, gets brutally murdered, and in addition to Mari Godwin writing a genre-defining horror novel, the Claire Clairmont character also creates an artistic masterwork, in this case a sad folk album.
Apparently some of the book is also inspired by the Manson murders, but I don’t know anything about them, whereas I know a fair amount about the Romantic poets and the infamous Year Without a Summer ghost story writing contest. This book drew from it really well–changed things enough to keep me guessing and make it feel like I wasn’t just reading a reskin of the events I know already, but full of fun little Easter eggs for Romantic poetry dorks, like Percy Shelley’s inability to realize that babies aren’t interchangeable.
This book does a good job of having both a thoughtful feminist perspective and female characters who are kind of awful. Everybody in the ‘70s crew is awful and also they’re all babies; the fraught relationship between Mari and her stepsister Lara, particularly the way they keep letting all these charismatic, creative, captivating, but ultimately shitty men get between them, is sad but very believable for teenagers. In the modern-day timeline, the fraught relationship between Em–a writer of cozy mysteries who stayed in her hometown and got married, then got sick, and is now going through a phenomenally ugly divorce–and Chess–who fucked off outta town as soon as she could and has now become an Instagram-perfect self-help writer–has to do mostly with things besides men but boy howdy does Em’s shitty ex-husband manage to insert himself into it.
There are a lot of good layers and reveals on top of reveals, which I won’t talk about here because I cannot be bothered to remember how spoiler tags work, but the result is certainly very compelling–when the novel started really picking up steam I found it difficult to put down. The aesthetic tension between the bright, sunny, live-laugh-love-ass vibes of the villa in the summer (and of Chess’ career) and the increasingly dark and fucked-up things we learn as the story unfolds is drawn in beautifully atmospheric, cinematic terms; Em clearly has a not just an eye for that sort of thing but a somewhat cynical hyper-awareness of it.
Overall, this was a really fun little thriller that weaves in a number of things that are Relevant To My Interests to create a deliciously claustrophobic story about creativity, jealousy, fucked-up interpersonal dynamics in many flavors, and the strengths and limitations to the curative powers of fucking off to Italy. Also, it really made me want to fuck off to Italy for a writer’s retreat.
Apparently some of the book is also inspired by the Manson murders, but I don’t know anything about them, whereas I know a fair amount about the Romantic poets and the infamous Year Without a Summer ghost story writing contest. This book drew from it really well–changed things enough to keep me guessing and make it feel like I wasn’t just reading a reskin of the events I know already, but full of fun little Easter eggs for Romantic poetry dorks, like Percy Shelley’s inability to realize that babies aren’t interchangeable.
This book does a good job of having both a thoughtful feminist perspective and female characters who are kind of awful. Everybody in the ‘70s crew is awful and also they’re all babies; the fraught relationship between Mari and her stepsister Lara, particularly the way they keep letting all these charismatic, creative, captivating, but ultimately shitty men get between them, is sad but very believable for teenagers. In the modern-day timeline, the fraught relationship between Em–a writer of cozy mysteries who stayed in her hometown and got married, then got sick, and is now going through a phenomenally ugly divorce–and Chess–who fucked off outta town as soon as she could and has now become an Instagram-perfect self-help writer–has to do mostly with things besides men but boy howdy does Em’s shitty ex-husband manage to insert himself into it.
There are a lot of good layers and reveals on top of reveals, which I won’t talk about here because I cannot be bothered to remember how spoiler tags work, but the result is certainly very compelling–when the novel started really picking up steam I found it difficult to put down. The aesthetic tension between the bright, sunny, live-laugh-love-ass vibes of the villa in the summer (and of Chess’ career) and the increasingly dark and fucked-up things we learn as the story unfolds is drawn in beautifully atmospheric, cinematic terms; Em clearly has a not just an eye for that sort of thing but a somewhat cynical hyper-awareness of it.
Overall, this was a really fun little thriller that weaves in a number of things that are Relevant To My Interests to create a deliciously claustrophobic story about creativity, jealousy, fucked-up interpersonal dynamics in many flavors, and the strengths and limitations to the curative powers of fucking off to Italy. Also, it really made me want to fuck off to Italy for a writer’s retreat.