Wednesday, September 29, 2021

SciFi/Fantasy/Horror Book Review: The Death of Jane Lawrence by Caitlin Starling

 



Full Disclosure:  This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on October 5, 2021 in exchange for a potential review.  I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.

The Death of Jane Lawrence is the second novel by author Caitlin Starling, whose debut The Luminous Dead was an incredible piece of sci-fi horror (my review here).  Starling followed up that novel with her queer weird horror fantasy novella, Yellow Jessamine, which I'm honestly a year later still not sure if I liked it or not - but it was certainly really interesting stuff.  Both stories featured a major element of psychological horror as their genre elements resulted in their protagonists seeming to lose their grips on their own sanities, and were pretty damn great at portraying a freaky as hell atmosphere.  So I was really curious to see how Starling would handle a more conventional genre of horror, Gothic Horror*, in this second novel.  

*Not that Gothic Horror isn't also known for making its protagonists unsure if they're going crazy, mind you.

And Starling delivers with this novel, which takes what seems like a fairly basic gothic horror presence - woman marries man she barely knows, who has a creepy mansion she must never sleep in and inevitably does - and creates an atmosphere that left me enthralled and desperate to learn what happens next.  As you might expect from Starling's work, this novel puts its heroine Jane through the ringer, making her question her sanity and what she is seeing at multiple points, and it uses its gothic horror setting in interesting ways that I was certainly not all expecting.  Add in a protagonist who is a rational and usually non-romantic woman, who is introverted and prefers the cool rational working of numbers and mathematics, and you have a lead who is easy to like and care about as things go to hell.  There's one twist that seemed pretty obvious, but other than that, if you like gothic horror or psychological horror, you will definitely enjoy this.  

---------------------------------------------------Plot Summary--------------------------------------------------
Jane Shoringfield has come up with a practical plan - she will find a man she can marry for social reasons only, who will expect no intimacy of her, so the two of them can use the marriage to manage social expectations - and most importantly allow Jane independence to work with the numbers and bookkeeping she loves most.  Her top target for this plan is the reclusive Doctor Augustine Lawrence, a brilliant surgeon who retreats to his own family manor between patients, and works mostly alone except for an assistant to fetch him when needed.  Jane doesn't know anything really about Augustine's background, but when she proposes to him, of both marriage and to work as his accountant, he accepts - on one condition:  She must never stay the night at Lindridge Hall, his family manor, but must always spend her nights at the Surgery without him.  For Jane, the arrangement seems perfect.  

Yet when Jane helps Augustine with a brutal surgery with strange and gruesome internal injury, and nearly breaks down because of her own coldness of what happened, Augustine comforts her.....and Jane and Augustine do begin to fall for one another.  Which only makes Jane start to want to spend the night with him after all....and then, on the night of their wedding, her carriage breaks down, forcing her to spend the night after all at Lindridge Hall.  There she discovers not the confident doctor she fell for, but a man unsure of his own realities - a man with secrets in his past and in this very house.  

And when Augustine's college friends show up to visit to try and entice him back into games of magic, Jane learns there is far more to Augustine and Lindridge Hall than she realized, including a dark past of shame that will threaten to envelop her and break her.  And when she is left alone in a house seemingly filled with the irrational, how long can Jane hold her grips on the calm rationality that has always guided her through life?  
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If you are familiar with Gothic Horror, the basics of the plot of The Death of Jane Lawrence will feel very familiar.  You have a young woman protagonist getting married to a man she hardly knows, who has secrets in his past, and a manor that she is not for some strange reason not supposed to stay in, which features things like a door with strange locks and old unkept rooms and hallways.  You expect for certain things therefore to happen - that her husband Augustine will turn out to be some kind of villain or have done something horrible in the past; that the house will be haunted by some kind of spirits, and that the protagonist will have to uncover the truth and take desperate actions to survive.  

The Death of Jane Lawrence, without spoiling too much, plays on those expectations, and in some ways fulfills them while in other ways subverts them.  The first way it does that is with its heroine, Jane.  Jane is not your typical gothic horror heroine, the woman who gets married to a man for romance and thus misses the hints that something lies underneath his mask.  Jane is a young woman who was orphaned as a child by a war* and has lived her life in the care of non-related guardians, who will under society's rules make all decisions for her until she is married.  They're not bad guardians mind you and are not oppressive or mean, but they're not her parents, and going with them back to the city where her parents died is not what Jane wants.  Instead Jane, a woman who prefers the cold rationality of math, account books, and number theorems to that of people, wants simply to stay where she is, work with numbers on her own and to do so independently of anyone else.  

*The story takes place in what seems to be a 19th century Great Britain-like country (Great Breltain) that has just finished a war with a Russia-like country.  I have no idea why it isn't just set in our Great Britain, but well, it basically is.*  

And so Jane's marriage isn't a love-match, and Jane proposes it specifically to not be a love match, even though she comes to love Augustine for his caring strength as a doctor, even when Jane shows herself to seemingly care little about a patient she helps Augustine operate on.  And so when Jane is confronted with the mysteries of Lindridge Hall, and the possibilities of Augustine's secrets, she tries to stick to calm rational reasoning to guide her, and tries to make that her strength...even when confronted with magic that requires her to believe things that might not otherwise be rational.  It makes Jane a fascinating character, as her actions aren't strictly guided by emotion, although there is plenty of that in her, as she is desperate to save the man she's fallen for, and to deal with both his and her own guilt.  

The story also subverts the standard formula by not making Augustine a clear bad guy, and making him sympathetic very much even as his secrets are revealed.  This is less a story about someone doing horrible things as much as a story about guilt and shame and living with those feelings....and the realization that such feelings cannot be allowed to eat one up....in this case, literally.  Jane forces Augustine to try to realize that he is being overly prideful and egotistic by insisting his tragedies are his fault, that they are his own shame to bear....and yet Jane herself as the story goes on finds herself falling into the very same trap.  And so Lindridge Hall begins to envelop her as well.  

Most interestingly, the story subverts the formula by having the husband not be the one with power, with Jane becoming that person instead, as she finds herself delving more and more into the possibilities of the irrational, into the possibilities of magic.  Jane may find herself in desperate straights as the novel goes on, and may find herself "haunted" by something I won't spoil, but this is due to her own choices and her own actions, and not because she got caught in any trap or got misled.  It makes her a fascinating heroine and the story a fascinating gothic horror novel - and a scary one in many ways too.  The novel isn't all unpredictable - one reveal in the final chapters is something I expected some variant of for a while as certain plot elements come into play - but it still surprises and ends in a fascinating even if somewhat horrifying (and yet maybe happy) way.  

Very much recommended for Gothic Horror fans.  

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