[Writers Read: Veronica Bond]
Her new novel, Death in Castle Dark, introduces a series which Bond describes as Cozy-Gothic. Death in Castle Dark focuses on a young actress who joins a murder mystery troupe in an eerie isolated castle.
At CrimeReads Bond tagged six favorite Gothic castles from literature, including:
Rebecca (1938) Daphne du MaurierRead about the other entries on the list.
Du Maurier’s setting, Manderley, is a giant family estate off the Cornwall coast; it is not officially a castle, yet the setting meets many Gothic criteria, including isolation, ahint of the supernatural, a heroine thrown into an alien environment and utterly without aid, and of course the requisite creepiness of the giant dwelling, Manderley, which the reader first sees in a horrific image via the narrator’s dream:
“A cloud, hitherto unseen, came upon the moon, and hovered an instant like a dark hand before a face. The illusion went with it, and the lights in the windows were extinguished. I looked upon a desolate shell, soulless at last, unhaunted, with no whisper of the past about its staring walls. The house was a sepulcher, our fear and suffering lay buried in the ruins. There would be no resurrection.”
Rebecca appears on L.C. Shaw's list of nine of the most memorable antagonists in fiction, Eliane Glaser's list of six of the best books on leadership, Penelope Lively’s list of five of her favorite gardens in literature, Xan Brooks's top ten list of terrible houses in fiction, Tom Easton's top ten list of fictional "houses which themselves seem to have a personality which affects the story," Martine Bailey's list of six of the best marriage plots in novels, Stella Gonet's six best books list, John Mullan's list of ten of the best conflagrations in literature, Tess Gerritsen's list of five favorite thrillers, Mary Horlock's list of the five best psychos in literature, and Derwent May's critic's chart of top country house books.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
