Maplecroft
Jan. 10th, 2015 11:49 am
Another book from last year that I've been meaning to read for a while in the form of Cherie Priest's Maplecroft, a enjoyably dark Lovecraftian horror novel set in New England in last part of the 19th century whose story unfolds in the alternating accounts of Lizzie Borden, her older sister Emma, and local doctor Owen Seabury.Opening two years after the murder of Andrew and Abby Borden, an event which is re-imagined as the necessary consequence of Lizzie's discovery that her father and step-mother have been possessed by eldritch horrors, the two sisters are living alone together in a large house called Maplecroft. Here Lizzie toils in the basement laboratory combining science with folklore in an attempt to discover a way to combat the fishy horrors that seem drawn to the house while Emma, her health destroyed by consumption, has built a parallel life for herself using the persona of a reclusive, respected, male marine biologist. It is Emma who puts the events of the book in chain, innocently dispatching a biological sample, a strange siphonophore found on the shoreline, to Phillip Zollicoffer, a long-time correspondent who is professor of biology at Miskatonic University.
Priest puts the famous murders into a new context by imagining them as Lizzie's desperate response to the possession of her parents by some nightmarish other-worldly force. The sisters claim to have suffered equally from the food poisonings that seem to have affected the entire household prior to the murders, only succeeding in saving themselves by locking themselves away from their parents and living on their own supplies of food. But where the historical accounts suggest that problems in the Borden house may have been caused by tainted meat, Priest cites a glowing green bit of sea glass worn on Abby Borden's necklace as the means by which the supernatural introduced itself to their unhappy household.
The Borden sisters' fragile existence is disturbed by the arrival of Lizzie's lover, the actress Nance O'Neil. Emma resents Nance's presence intensely while Lizzie, who ought to be delighted, becomes increasingly worried by Nance's growing obsession with the contents of the cellar and comes to suspect that her girlfriend is coming under the sway of the hypnotic fragments of green sea glass hidden in a lead lined box in the floor of the cellar. Zollicoffer, meanwhile, having spent the last year becoming increasingly fixated with Emma's mysterious specimen, has descended into madness: a new misanthropy has grown into full-on paranoia and psychosis with his realisation that the specimen, which he has named Physalia zollicoffris, has started to talk to him.
Meanwhile the last remaining narrator, Owen Seabury, finds himself struggling to contain a mysterious outbreak of a new disease in Fall River. Called in to treat young Matthew Granger, the godson of the owners of the local knick-knack store, Seabury notices disturbing parallels between the teenager's symptoms — listlessness, photo-sensitivity, bloating — with those he first saw in Abby Borden on the night of her death. Events come to a head when Seabury finds himself summoned to the police station in the dead of night to assess Ebenezer Hamilton, Matthew's godfather, who has been charged with killing the boy in self-defence and who pours out a terrible story of horror and madness that fills Seabury with a dreadful fear. Gradually, over the weeks, the bloating disease becomes increasingly common and Seabury finds himself called to investigate one macabre death scene after another.
Gradually the three strands of the story align as Nance falls under the sway of the green glass, Seabury battles the spreading bloating disease, and Zollicoffer, who now believes the specimen to be a dark goddess, embarks on a series of frenzied murders. Each of the principal characters finds themselves tested and, as with the best horror stories, even those who are not found wanting must pay a terrible price for their survival: the loss of a loved one; the destruction of the thing that they hold most dear; the slow loss of sanity. The characters are realistically portrayed, despite the presence of eldritch horrors from the deep, and although events — and presumably characters — diverge from the historical record, Priest does a fine job of weaving the two together to form a convincing whole.