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Blake knows she’s in a gothic horror novel the moment she steps off the rain-slicked ferry.
The sense that she is the heroine of a gothic novel returns to her unbidden.
it’s not a house—it’s the setting of a Radcliffe novel.
I’ll just have to deal with feeling like I’m at the mercy of some unseen writer’s plot twists.”
“I can’t help feeling like”—God, she can’t believe she’s saying this out loud—“like I’m in a gothic novel.
The novel of which she’s the reluctant heroine will not—cannot—continue under the warmth of the sun. This is not a request or a recommendation; it’s a staple of the genre. The rule.
“I feel like I’m stuck between the pages of a gothic novel.”
“I need to observe the rules of gothic fiction to get through this.”
she was following the rules of surviving a gothic horror novel
she has succumbed to the plot of her gothic horror novel.
That’s what—in her letter—Blake said she felt like she was trapped in. A horror story of castles and secrecy and supernatural occurrences. Has Thalia unwittingly become another character?
Her talk of ghosts and being trapped in a horror novel unnerved Thalia to her core.
“It’s rusticated wood,”
again?
It reminds me of the novels I read when I was younger. Rebecca was my favorite. Have you read it? I can’t be the first guest to feel like the second Mrs. de Winter, spirited up to Manderley’s highest chamber and at the mercy of the sinister Mrs. Danvers.”
It’s like someone pulled this mansion—and these people—straight from the pages of Matthew Lewis.
“Once upon a time,” Ethel says,
Seriously?!?
That was the first time she mentioned she felt like she was trapped in a gothic novel.”
I took solace in the work of Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Mary Shelley, Anne Rice, Shirley Jackson, and Toni Morrison. I saw myself as Jane Eyre, Eleanor Vance, or, at my darkest, Frankenstein’s monster. I felt like my life only moved forward on the arcs of these novels, that it only had meaning when I was lost in their pages, away from the realities of being abandoned and alone.
She knows her five-minute condensed version of events sounds, well, like the plot of a novel.
