A Hearse for Dark Harbor

Dark Harbor #2

by Clarissa Ross, W.E.D. Ross (AKA)

A LEPER'S GHOST

Rose was worried when her friend Helen went to live in a commune on Pirates Island. And when Helen wrote, saying that Rose should never again try to contact her, Rose knew she must come to Dark Harbor to find her friend.

Thus began an ordeal of terror which would expose her to the sinister ghost of the Leper Mary - a ghost with no face, wearing a veil and a long black habit.

And Rose, propelled into a miasma of violent treachery, dark occult ceremonies, and phantom hauntings, knew she might find her friend...but she might lose her sanity, perhaps even her life!

Genres: Gothic

190 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1974

About the author

William Edward Daniel Ross, W. E. Daniel "Dan" Ross (born 1912) is a bestselling Canadian novelist from Saint John, New Brunswick who wrote over 300 books in a variety of genres and under a variety of mostly female pseudonyms such as Laura Frances Brooks, Lydia Colby, Rose Dana, Jan Daniels, Ross Olin, Diane Randall, Clarissa Ross, Leslie Ames, Ruth Dorset, Ann Gilmer, Jane Rossiter, Dan Ross, Dana Ross, Marilyn Ross, Dan Roberts, and W.E.D. Ross. As Marilyn Ross he wrote popular Gothic fiction including a series of novels about the vampire Barnabas Collins based on the American TV series Dark Shadows (1966-71).

Reviews

[Sarah Mac]

This was an incredibly silly premise, but one of the best Ross contemps I've encountered. Go figure. :D

Ross must've hated living through the Free Love period. *amused* His low opinion of the unwashed Woodstock youth faction is crystal clear throughout his oeuvre, but this Manson Family knockoff & accompanying degenerate hangers-on at the monastery are by far the most blatantly (or passively) Evul creations of his anti-hippie bias. Only a handful were selected for redemption by virtue of their cultivated friendship with Rose, the doggedly persistent (& very clean) heroine. :P

That said...this was still a good story, both for the LOLzy moments & the more serious mystery of Helen, & I really liked the bittersweet ending with Rose & Derek. So here's something I don't often get to say:

Good job, Dan Ross. ;)

[William]

As Sarah Mac, the other reviewer of this book, pointed out, it's really strange to compliment Dan aka Clarissa Ross for a job well done. Devotees of his pulpy 70s gothics accept that part of the fun is the clunkiness and quirks, likely because as the record-holder for most prolific Canadian writer, Ross didn't waste time on subtleties like plot, character development, style. In fact, he had a bag of tricks he liked to use, such as dialogue that, like soap operas, provided recaps and ate up word counts by speculating about future events. So when a book comes along like "A Hearse for Dark Harbor" that's more fun than annoying, it's a signal event. Here, in the second of Ross's 1974-1975 "Dark Harbor" series, Ross tells a fun story about a young secretary from New York who goes in search of her missing roommate, who has fallen into the clutches of an ominous commune/Satanic cult occupying a former monastery/leper colony on the cliffs of Pirate Island, an island off Cape Cod. Rose Marks is more self-possessed and less annoying than the typical Ross heroine, partly because she spends a lot of the novel smarting off to the Phil Waring, the cult's Manson-esque leader--who, in typical Ross bizarro back story fashion--is the son of a stage magician and employs stagecraft in his rituals. All of Ross's loathing of hippies, communes, and the let-it-all-hang-out lifestyle is on view here: we learn over and over that the members of the commune take all sorts of drugs (pot! heroin! Mexican incense!), are dirty, shiftless and are terrible parents, besides being exploited by their guru, who likes to whip disobedient female members in front of the assembled commune. Ross brings back two of his saintly, crusty islanders from the first volume--a bluff family doctor and a hearty old sea captain--to help matters along. He also tidily sidelines Joyce Mills, the annoying heroine of the first novel in the series and re-casts her husband Derek as an upstanding, community-minded young hero, rather than the mama's boy bully he was in "Ghost of Dark Harbor." All in all, "A Hearse for Dark Harbor" (and yes, there is indeed a hearse) is an entertaining tour through what bugged the then-62 year-old author.