Wednesday, November 4, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas



Catherine House is a gothic fiction novel by debut author Elisabeth Thomas.  It's a short but really fascinating novel, featuring as its setting (a key element of gothic fiction) a fictional small "liberal arts" university, in which students spend 3 years in complete isolation from the rest of the world, with no phone, internet, or other media connection to the outside.  Of course, as is the point of gothic fiction, what is really going on at this college is more than first meets the eye.

And again, the result is really interesting, even if I'm not sure how I think about it even after a full day to contemplate it all.  It's a novel that takes the theme of colleges manipulating and abusing the trust of their students and makes it almost literal, and the lead character is incredibly devastating to read - a young woman with nothing left to live for outside going into a place she doesn't quite know what to think of - and doesn't even think she wants - except that she knows it has to be better than what's outside.....

More thoughts after the jump:

---------------------------------------------------Plot Summary-----------------------------------------------------
Catherine.  It's a source of wonder and suspicion in the United States - a small secluded "liberal arts" college like no other, with some of the most disproportionately successful alumni in the country.  Its students are chosen by some esoteric method which no one can figure out, via a grueling interview process and in return attend the school for free.  But the cost is high: the students must spend all three of their years there in isolation, with no contact between them and the outside world - no phone, mail, internet, or any other type of contact whatsoever.

Ines doesn't really care about any of that - she just is happy to be away from the outside world, where she had nothing and no one to care for, and had just escaped responsibility from what she feels is a horrible crime.  Now that she's at Catherine, unlike some of the other students, she figures she'll just party and enjoy her life as much as she can....as long as she doesn't get kicked out.  But when Ines sees the leaders of Catherine House behaving strangely and promoting a strange almost magical like substance called plasm, she at first tries to stay away.  But she can't stay away forever - not if she wants to stay at Catherine - and the connection will put Ines through a ringer of tragedies that will threaten what little she has left in her life and her future......
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Catherine House is a gothic novel for sure and it very much thrives off portraying the setting in its full creepiness, just as with any gothic (horror) novel.  In this case, that's through the campus of Catherine itself, with its isolation from the outside world, its rooms that are locked with keycards only accessible to those in what seems to be a strange cult of science (around Plasm), and the strange almost hypnotic weekly sessions that all students at least part way into their first year wind up in.  Add in the trauma that Ines suffers from - to say nothing of the other students as well (more on that in a bit) and well, it does the gothic setting incredibly well. 

And that setting is used to create what is basically a college as a cult - one that isn't really that hard to see in today's society in a lesser extent, and well one that you can kind of imagine certain colleges in the States actually resembling.  It is quickly clear that everyone who comes to Catherine has a certain amount of trauma in their pasts - in fact it's the reason they were chosen, because of the horrors they have faced in their past.  The school uses its curriculum to essentially force students into very specific concentrations, which feature nervewracking presentations, and when students do poorly, they are forced to go into what is essentially solitary confinement - something that is a horror in actual prisons, nevertheless it is used here in an actual school.  The idea is to get the students to not only express their love of the school once they leave to the actual world, but to never ever want to leave.  And that's even more shown in the mysterious Plasm research, which is the tightest controlled secret in the school, with its participants behaving even more cultlike - isolated from everyone else in secrecy for large portions of time, with their research controlled into a certain isolated direction...and never allowed to go anywhere else.*

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In this atmosphere is Ines, a girl from a rough family situation - as in she separated from her mom early on - and just went wild.....until it resulted in a tragedy she's convinced could have landed her in jail if anyone knew about it.  Instead, her favorite teacher directed her to Catherine, and not knowing what else to do, she applied and got in.  Unlike some of the other students, she really had no ambitions at Catherine House and just wanted to live - whether that be partying and barely passing, or whatnot, as long as she doesn't have to leave.  And so much of this story, as she first grows close to her ambitious but scarred roommate Baby and then to her other friends, is Ines learning to value herself and to realize that there might be a future out there for her - that the dead end cult of Catherine isn't the only path for her.  The book kind of cheats about this revelation - in order for the ending to work, it sort of has to give a random character a skill early on that is really random except as a chekhov's gun for the endgame - the endgame where Ines makes her final decision on whether or not she is going to live.  But that cheating works because the emotional payoff is well done, as Ines learns to try and find something and to reject the horror of the House, of Catherine and its cultish behavior, even if it means she leaves again with nothing.

In short, this is a hell of a debut novel, and well recommended. 

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