The Daughters of Block Island

by Christa Carmen

I’m a fly who’s placed one thin leg onto a strand of spiderweb, and the house, the weaver, felt the vibrations, heard my thoughts.

And now this letter. This clue to Maureen’s walled-off personality, her rigidity, her cold, impenetrable nature. This clue to Thalia’s personality, formed like a piece of sea glass by a childhood as capricious as the waves.

Blake knows she’s in a gothic horror novel the moment she steps off the rain-slicked ferry.

It is the Castle of Otranto. Ambrosio’s abbey. Manderley. Udolpho. Every setting from every novel that has held her rapt and terrified over the years. It will hold her within its walls until her reason for coming

to the island disintegrates beneath her. It is claustrophobia and decay and tragedy too intense for her fragile, newly recovered self to take.

From that moment, she was hooked, far from the first overlooked and neglected little girl to become lost in classic literature. Was it a cliché to have seen herself in Jane Eyre, or the eponymous Rebecca, or in The Castle of Otranto’s Isabella?

The goat-cheese-and-asparagus omelet, hash browns fried to perfection, and grilled bagel with blueberry preserves look too delicious to resist.

i love food descriptions in my gothics!

“It sounds like you saw the resident ghost of White Hall. That of the great-great-grandaunt I was telling you about, Mary Hopkins Searles, who weeps tears of arsenic and mourns her long-lost love.”

She will bring her cup of—what does The Haunting of Hill House’s protagonist, Eleanor Vance, call it? Her cup of stars?