New England Gothic

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Two things today. No, three.

One.  My dad was the music critic for the old Chicago Daily News. As a result, he got to see many productions before the rest of the world.

One was Kismet. (I mean—the musical, Kismet.) Another was West Side Story. Yup. West Side Story. In press previews.

Many years later, I asked him: did you know, when you heard it? When you heard This is My Beloved? Or Tonight?  Did you know they were special?

Yes, he told me. I did.

Two. And it’s the same for books. I get asked to blurb a lot of books. A lot. And often, I say no. I truly do not have time. And I do not want to give a book short shrift.

But sometimes, I say yes.  And then—when the book is fabulous, I feel as if I—like my dad—I have been privy to something special. Something that the rest of the world will soon discover.

Doug at launching Mysterious Books

Three. Meet Doug Burgess. And his (Publishers Weekly starred reviewed!) Fogland Point.

And a copy of his debut novel to one lucky commenter! My name is on the cover. With Nick Petrie, and Michael Koryta. See? Fabulous.

What is Fogland Point about? Please welcome Doug Burgess to tell you.

New England Gothic: 

Mystery and Memory in a Rhode Island Village

When I was a kid, my Uncle George figured large in our dinner conversations. There were stories of his war exploits, his travels around the world, the time he met film star Peggy Hopkins Joyce on the Fall River Line ferry to New London and proposed (unsuccessfully) somewhere in Long Island Sound. Finally I brought up the nerve to ask why this remarkable person was never invited to our house.

“Because he died in 1939,” my father answered.

Growing up in a damp and ancient house deep in Swamp Yankee country, the dead were everywhere around me. Our once-large Rhode Island family had dwindled down through the generations until the only remnants were my grandparents, parents, brother and myself. Yet both my elementary and high schools were named after relatives, as was the posh university across the street. The many branches of the family tree lent their names to half the streets of Providence and Newport. 

My father liked to pull the car into random cemeteries, point to a weathered piece of granite and announce brightly, “There’s your Great-Aunt Lydia!”

All this could make a child morbid, or worse. In my case it gave me a curious sense of time. My grandparents, both near-centenarians at their death, had been born when ice was delivered in horse carts and there was still an Austro-Hungarian Empire. 

But when they spoke of the past it did not seem so long ago: the people they described were as real to me as my friends. Vignettes from their lives were offered like a basket of rolls at every holiday dinner: Grandpa Butler gifting his wife with peaches at Christmas because he fancied peach jam, Cousin Betty feeding Alka-Seltzer tablets to the despised seagulls that terrorized her Chihuahua, Uncle Walter in his fisherman’s sou’wester paying for a Steinway piano with a scaly roll of hundred-dollar bills. 

Soon I, too, began telling their stories—eventually, as my grandmother’s mind declined, I told them back to her.

The places, likewise, did not seem impossibly distant, but that was because they were still there. Like much of New England, Rhode Island never changes. The main street of my parent’s town looks much like it did when John Quincy Adams passed through on his way to Washington; the town library where I borrowed my first Agatha Christie was once a congressional hall that voted down the U.S. Constitution in 1790. 

Even the furnishings of my house unmoored me: in school there were Game Boys and Backstreet Boys, yet each evening I wrote my calculus homework on a table brought back from Burma in 1850 and slept in a bed that had birthed three generations of ancestors.

When I came to write Fogland Point, history, memory and place were much in my mind. The story of a young man who returns to the small Rhode Island village of his childhood to take care of a grandmother now coping with dementia, only to discover a body in the house next door, there is much beyond the mystery that is both personal and autobiographical. 

What few people realize is that dementia is not just about what one forgets, but remembers.

As it progressed in my Nana’s mind, she began to move through time at random. One moment she would be a little girl describing the fixtures of her parents’ house in Riverside; next she would begin a conversation with her friend Florence who died in the ‘80’s. 

Once in our car she became convinced that my dad, her son, was abducting her from school and said angrily, “My father is going to be so mad with you!” But then she turned and saw me in the back seat and immediately asked how my studies were getting on. It was as if she had finally transcended the fragile bonds of past and present that I had brushed against my entire life.

Dementia brings the concept of the unreliable narrator to a new level, and this, too, I wanted to explore. Were my grandmother’s memories to be believed? Were her confessions to be trusted? Was my Great-Uncle Bob Daniels really a pedophile, as she suddenly and startlingly claimed? Secrets came pouring out of her, but each left more questions than answers. Much of this translated into the novel.

 Nevertheless I was surprised when a friend read an early draft and said, “Well, you certainly brought Southern Gothic to Southern New England.” So surprised, in fact, that I looked up Southern Gothic on Wikipedia. 

And there it was: “deeply flawed, disturbing or eccentric characters who may be involved in hoodoo, ambivalent gender roles, decayed or derelict settings, grotesque situations, and other sinister events…”

Substitute hoodoo with the Congregational Church and this could have been on the dust jacket for Fogland Point. The world of a dementia sufferer—and those around them—is indeed a kind of gothic landscape where the veneer of the familiar overlays horrors, real and imagined, beneath.

There is a line in the book that strikes particularly close to home: “The house looks just the same as it always has…like nobody has told it the bad news. All my grandmother’s things are waiting for her to come back.” The backdrop remains both homey and comforting, even as the story becomes increasingly bizarre. This was my experience with my own grandmother, and I expect for many others as well.

That porous barrier between real and imagined takes on an increasingly desperate dimension as the disease progresses. We want to hold onto the memories before they are gone for good. A plot device that frames much of the novel—a series of stories told into a tape recorder by multiple narrators—came from one such reel I discovered myself in the family library.

 On it was my father’s youthful voice, and my great-grandfather’s, which I had never heard. Dad asks Grandpa about life during the Depression. “What Depression?” Grandpa wonders. Already the confusion has begun to claim him, as it would his daughter. Sometimes I think I wrote Fogland Point out of fear—that I, too, must tell my stories before it is too late.

I certainly did not set out to write a New England Gothic mystery; on the contrary, in their speech, mannerisms, histories and lives, each of the characters is as real and down-to-earth as I could make them. But the phlegmatic New England Way is a mask we all wear. Anything ugly, unsightly or not-quite-right is shunted behind the house, hidden in the garden shed, so that we can present a pleasant face to company.

In that sense, Rhode Islanders make the best murder suspects anywhere—we conceal everything. The exquisite distress that family and friends experienced as my Nana began voicing her truth is mirrored by the characters in Fogland Point; as Aunt Constance says in the novel, “You shouldn’t pay too much mind to the things she says. She can’t keep stuff inside anymore.”

New England also lends its atmospheric presence to gothic mystery: no craggy moor or swampy fen was ever so desolate as Easton’s Beach on a blustery November afternoon. I chose the town of Little Compton partly because of family connections, but mainly because of its rugged beauty and curiously isolated location, a peninsula jutting out into the North Atlantic without even a bay to protect it. 

The place names were so evocative that I sometimes feared to include them, lest the novel seem garish: Quicksand Pond, Despair Island, even Fogland Point itself. In rendering them I tried to remain as true to the landscape as possible (although my father experienced a moment of panic when he realized, after consulting the map, that Fogland lay just over the town border in Tiverton. Oh, well).
If Fogland Point is gothic, it is only because Rhode Island is equally so: a place where the dead are never truly gone and the past seems forever present. Gothic mystery doesn’t need rotting plantation houses or Spanish moss. A whitewashed Colonial, a neatly trimmed yard and a secret that can’t stay hidden will do just as well.

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Whoa. Fabulous. And this is a terrific book. SO—do you love Gothic novels? What does that mean to you? And what do you think about what Doug says?

And a copy of FOGLAND POINT to one very very lucky commenter!

"Elegant prose, a veritable Chinese box of puzzles, and authentic, well-rounded characters make this a standout." Publishers Weekly starred review

Preorder HERE.

Doug Burgess was born in Connecticut. After moving to Rhode Island, where his paternal family has lived for over three hundred years, he received his first education from the Quaker Friends at ses Brown School. Burgess received a BA  from McGill,   a JD from Cornell,  , an LLM from the University of British Columbia and a PhD from Brown University . He now teaches at Yeshiva College.

In 2003, Burgess wrote a dissertation arguing for the legal linkages between piracy and terrorism, and for the possible use of piracy law as a foundation for defining international terrorist organizations. This concept was later articulated in articles for Legal Affairs Magazine,  the National Security Law Report, the New York Times  and other publications. It appeared in book form as "The World For Ransom" (2010). Burgess continues to lecture around the world on counter-terrorism and the law.

Burgess has authored numerous articles for trade and scholarly journals, and one novel, FOGLAND POINT —a mystery set in Little Compton, Rhode Island.

He is a featured blogger for The Huffington Post.  

Who Lived in THE DOLLHOUSE?

"Davis’s impeccably structured debut is equal parts mystery, tribute to midcentury New York City, and classic love story. . . .
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: I didn’t plan to make this rites of passage week, but it’s turning out that way. Yesterday, our pre-teens. Today, coming of age. Maybe. Do you remember the first place you lived all on your own?

I was 20, and, post-college, lived in a cute house (two bedrooms, LR, DR, bath, kitchen, driveway) on Illinois St. in Indianapolis. It was adorable, and such fun to share with my roommate (and still pal) Sharon. Our rent was $100. Total. A month. We scrimped and shared food and painted it ourselves and worked 7 days a week (I had two jobs, as a radio reporter and on weekends as an art galley helper, and Sharon sold real estate) and wow, we were on our own.

But you know the Barbizon? Of course you do. Think how many women were on their own for the first time there? And the brilliant Fiona Davis took that iconic apartment building in NYC and turned it into an acclaimed novel.

Here’s a bit about THE DOLLHOUSE—and I dare you not to gasp with, well, either mad desire to read it, or mad envy for not having thought of it. 

“Fiona Davis's stunning debut novel pulls readers into the lush world of New York City's glamorous Barbizon Hotel for Women, where in the 1950s a generation of aspiring models, secretaries, and editors lived side by side while attempting to claw their way to fairy-tale success, and where a present-day journalist becomes consumed with uncovering a dark secret buried deep within the Barbizon's glitzy past.” 

Okay, love it, right?

Fiona and I shared an event with Amy Poeppel (Small Admissions) and  Rachel Hulin (Hey Harry Hey Matilda) in Providence with Robin Kall Homonoff---here we are. (And in real life, we actually were in focus.)  It was great fun, and I’m so pleased to introduce her to you all.

(And we’re giving away a copy of THE DOLLHOUSE to a lucky commenter)
 

HANK: So, Fiona. How did you come up with this brilliant idea?

FIONA DAVIS: I stumbled on it.  A few years ago, I was apartment hunting in New York City and my broker took me to the Barbizon 63 condo, in what used to be the Barbizon Hotel for Women. While I didn’t take the apartment, the building had great bones and an intriguing history – the perfect setting for a work of historical fiction. Built in 1927, the Barbizon Hotel was the go-to place for cultured young women to live in while they worked or studied in New York City, the place where icons like Grace Kelly, Lauren Bacall, Joan Didion and Eudora Welty got their start

HANK: Whoa. Yes, it’s so incredibly intriguing—when you think of all the women who lived there, and the changes that unfolded over the years. And why it existed in the first place! How’d you tackle the approach you’d take?

FIONA: I’d been working as a journalist for many years, but the thought of turning a story idea into fiction was a new one. So I approached it the same way I would an article: do the research, figure out the main characters, make an outline and off you go. “How hard could it be?” I thought to myself.  

HANK: Famous last words. I have said them myself. And so?

FIONA: But as I researched and plotted, my ambition got way ahead of me. Perhaps if I’d stuck to the historical fiction genre, I might have gotten off easy. But I had the insane idea to write about two time periods – the 1950s and today – and not only that, I simply had to add a mystery element into the plot.

HANK: Two timelines, two sets of characters, tons of research to make sure the period details are right, AND make it a mystery?

FIONA: Anyone with good sense might have stopped right there. But I adored the work of paragons like Agatha Christie, Laura Lippman, and Elizabeth George, so it was crucial to me to have a question that was answered at the end of the book, in a way that my readers least suspected.

I’ve never been a fan of books that meander along, examining the minutiae of a person’s soul. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but as a reader, I crave mysteries because they engage not only my imagination, but my powers of reasoning. You know what I’m talking about - that running commentary in your mind as you turn the pages: Was that a red herring? Or a clue? If the author is overtly pointing my attention to this character as the murderer, who else might have done it? So weaving a mystery element in to THE DOLLHOUSE was non-negotiable.

HANK: We’re all with you on that. But back to that setting. Who’d you talk to?

FIONA:  As part of my research, I interviewed ex-guests who’d stayed there in the 1950s and 60s and was surprised to learn there was a lot of talk of ghosts and suicides among the guests, because every so often a distraught young girl would throw herself off the balcony, and that this was often hushed up in the press.

There was my angle. In my book, a heartsick journalist moves into what’s now the Barbizon condo and starts investigating a tragedy that occurred to her downstairs neighbor – an elderly woman with a terrible scar and a dark secret.

HANK: And then what?

FIONA:  Over multiple drafts, the story grew to encompass a number of themes, from women’s roles at work and at home to the challenges of aging, but what kept me sitting at my desk was the fun of revealing the unknown: what really happened back then?

HANK: Well it certainly worked! Here’s the rest of that PW starred review! “Darby and Rose, in alternating chapters, weave intricate threads into twists and turns that ultimately bring them together; the result is good old-fashioned suspense." 

Hurray!

I don’t think anything as glamorous and suspenseful happened in my first place alone—does cutthroat Charades count? But I treasure that time.  How about you, Reds? The first time you lived on our own—not school—where was it?

And we’ll give away a copy of THE DOLLHOUSE to one lucky commenter!

  

Fiona can be found on her website, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.  

Fiona Davis

Fiona was born in Canada and raised in New Jersey, Utah and Texas. She began her career in New York City as an actress, where she worked on Broadway, off-Broadway and in regional theater. After 10 years, she changed careers, working as an editor and writer and specializing in health, fitness, nutrition, dance and theater. 

She’s a graduate of the College of William and Mary and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and is based in New York City. She loves nothing better than hitting farmer’s markets on weekends in search of the perfect tomato, and traveling to foreign cities steeped in history, like London and Cartagena. THE DOLLHOUSE is her first novel.

THE DOLLHOUSE

When she arrives at the famed Barbizon Hotel in 1952, secretarial school enrollment in hand, Darby McLaughlin is everything her modeling agency hall mates aren't: plain, self-conscious, homesick, and utterly convinced she doesn't belong—a notion the models do nothing to disabuse. Yet when Darby befriends Esme, a Barbizon maid, she's introduced to an entirely new side of New York City: seedy downtown jazz clubs where the music is as addictive as the heroin that's used there, the startling sounds of bebop, and even the possibility of romance.
 
Over half a century later, the Barbizon's gone condo and most of its long-ago guests are forgotten. But rumors of Darby's involvement in a deadly skirmish with a hotel maid back in 1952 haunt the halls of the building as surely as the melancholy music that floats from the elderly woman's rent-controlled apartment. It's a combination too intoxicating for journalist Rose Lewin, Darby's upstairs neighbor, to resist—not to mention the perfect distraction from her own imploding personal life. Yet as Rose's obsession deepens, the ethics of her investigation become increasingly murky, and neither woman will remain unchanged when the shocking truth is finally revealed.

On the road with SAY NO MORE!

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: What we're writing? I'm in the "after we've written" part--on  the SAY NO MORE book tour! And loving it. 

Here's one shot of launch night! 

 and here's C. J. Box and Linwood Barclay with me at Poisoned Pen (where  the fabulous Rhys came to the Sunday event!) 

and with...Diana Gabaldon!

And in Denver at Tattered Cover with our own Laura DiSilverio (and a bad case of altitude sickness..)

 Right now I’m in such a chic hotel room in Madison Wisconsin, getting ready to speak at Mystery To Me Bookstore, a beautiful independent in the heart of this vibrant college town.

I took a walk down a quaint little street to enjoy the beautiful fall day, and pretend everything was normal, and say hi to the bookstore.  (What a treat to see it! Not only was SAY NO MORE in the window, and prominently on the shelf, but also saw an ENTIRE shelf of just Rhys!)

The bookstore owner was so happy to see me, and it was so touching and lovely. And we talked a bit about bookstore appearances and how they are getting fewer and farther betweener.  About how even the biggest of book big shots often fail to draw a crowd—so true! I have been to some events at various bookstores to see authors I consider must-reads and must-sees, and the attendance is sparse.

Some authors hate to do it—because it takes a lot of time, it’s exhausting and stressful...and in the end, hard to quantify whether it’s worth it.

As you all well know, I am a big proponent of “worth it.”  

Thursday (tonight!) to celebrate SAY NO MORE I will be at the wonderful Mystery Lovers Bookshop in Oakmont—and I know some of you are in the vicinity! Come say hello.

And wow—it is getting amazing reviews—The Washington Post calls it “stellar”! I am floating! But one of my favorite review words comes from Publisher’s Weekly—which gives it a rave, and calls it “unflinching.”

Part of that, I hope, comes from my portrayal of a victim of campus sexual assault. Ripped from the headlines? Yes, except remember I wrote this two years ago, and, sadly campus sexual assault is even more in the headlines now. You know the stats: it happens to one in five college women. Most often in the first week of classes—so dangerous, that week is known as The Red Zone.  And 150 colleges are under federal investigation for failing to report the incidents.

So here’s a little from SAY NO MORE from the point of view of a young victim/survivor, a students at Adams Bay College, named Isabel Russo.  She’s so traumatized about her assault, she can’t bring herself to leave her apartment.

ISABEL RUSSO

Isabel looked at the checkerboard of days on her August calendar, the one she’d found online and printed on the portable device set up by the coffee-maker on her kitchen counter. It was a high point of her day, she had to admit, when she got to obliterate another square, the big black Magic Marker X reassuring her she was one step closer to graduation. One day closer to leaving Adams Bay College, leaving Boston, leaving her old life behind and going somewhere, anywhere, anyplace no one knew her. Where no one knew what had happened to her. And where they never ever ever would. She would never say a word.

She stared at the remaining calendar squares. So many of them. Every day at six p.m. she crossed off that day. If she did it in the morning, the day wasn’t truly over yet, so the moment wasn’t as meaningful.

Twenty years old, she thought, as she poised the thick black Sharpie over the square marked “Monday.” And I am counting the days until I can leave this apartment.

Apartment. She looked around the little place she’d called home since she came to Boston going on four years ago, full of hope and excitement, full of her future as a performer or teacher or both. She’d gotten good news on the very first day, when she’d won the school’s freshman housing lottery and was allowed to opt out of Adams Bay’s notoriously crowded dorms. Her mother, to her wild delight, had agreed to pay the extra it would cost.

At first, Isabel adored her new home base. She painted most of it pale blue, one wall pristine china white. Hand-stitched—because who has a sewing machine?—curtains from yards of blue-striped linen, installed with expandable rods from CVS. As inspiration, she arranged her framed posters of Maria Callas singing Tosca and Mirella Freni as Mimi, and in a fit of do-it-yourself fervor, successfully installed her little corner-mounted speakers. She put two potted scheffleras and a folding chair on her tiny wrought-iron balcony, a fire escape, really, overlooking Kenmore Square. She invited classmates to visit, and they’d drunk Nebbiolo and listened to her vinyl and compared, well, notes. The whole scene was cool, proof she was independent and free and grown-up and on her own.

Since last semester, though—last May, to be exact, one Friday night in May, to be horribly exact—her apartment had been all about allowing her to be apart: an apart-ment. She wished she could be apart from everything.

An email pinged her attention. Professor Ruth Tully. Again wanting her to come to the summer semester’s final Music Theory 301 classes in person, not rely on notes and online lectures. All the classes had video hookups for those who were disabled, or sick, or for when the winter weather was so miserable that attendance would be difficult for commuting students. The college-by-video thing was Isabel’s lifesaver now. If Isabel didn’t have to go outside—not set one foot outside, not ever, not ever again . . .

She pursed her lips, focused on the sunlight fracturing through the faceted crystal she’d hung from a thin wire over her kitchen window. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet . . . silently she named the colors. The world was still beautiful, she needed to remember.

“Sorry, Professor,” she typed. “I’ll do video. Thanks.”

Send. Done. With only a twinge of regret. Professor Tully was very sweet to care about her so much. Isabel wondered if she suspected something. Professor Morgan, too, sometimes inquired, wondering why Isabel was no longer attending her gatherings.

Obviously when a once-proficient classical music student vanishes from class, something is going on. But her professors, even well-meaning ones, could pry only so far.

Someday she’d be able to go outside again. She’d tried it already, several times. But when she stepped out into the hallway, or smelled the—anyway. It became surprisingly easy to keep to herself. Friends faded away, most of them. She ordered food from the delivery place, got books online, and sent assignments via e-mail. She had her music. She listened to her operas. She practiced her pieces. She could manage better in another reality. In someone else’s story.

She would have transferred out of Adams Bay instantly, after the event. But she’d have lost her tuition. And credits.

“You’re fine. You’ll be fine.” She could hear her mother’s voice. How could she know about “fine”? But then her mother, long-distance from St. Louis, had closed the door. And locked it. “We cannot afford it, not anymore. And we cannot tell your brother. It would kill him.”

And there it was, the hierarchy, the family relationships in one little sentence. Who mattered, and who didn’t.

Here at “home” she didn’t have to touch anyone else. Or smell any- one. Or look into anyone’s eyes.

Nothing had happened to “him,” of course. She’d never say his name again. Never even think it. Never poison her mind with it. She’d make him a no one, a nobody, exactly as he’d done to her.

She looked up, glanced around as if someone could be watching. It always felt as if someone were, which was ridic. But Dame Callas’s darkly disapproving eyes seemed to stare right at her, and Mirella’s sweet expression had turned to pity. Isabel blinked, dismissing her fantasy. They’re only posters. She looked at her watch. 6:30. Gormay on the Way would arrive in an hour.

She had time.

She clicked into Facebook, hit the bookmark for his profile. Smiling, smiling, smiling. It was like this every day. Why did she keep looking? She went to Instagram, checked his IG photos. She’d watched as his friend list grew, saw him amass endless “likes” with his stupid sports and silly pop concert tickets and dumb jokes. He’d gotten a new car, she saw, scanning the newest photos. Another new girlfriend. She was smiling, too, even kind of seemed familiar. She clicked away from the heart-twisting, stomach-turning site. Enough.

Her next stop was always the “help” sites. Somehow, not being alone in her grief was reassuring. Even though it should have been chilling. But she had to look, once a day, every day.

Sexually assaulted on campus? We want to hear your story.

The headline on the Facebook “WE CAN HELP” home page was so shocking, so surprising, so unexpected, she blinked at it, willing her eyes to go back into focus. The postage-stamp-sized icon was of a scale of justice. “Maybe you can prevent this from happening to someone else,” the article began. “Make a difference,” it said. “Take back the power.”

“Click here,” it said.

She looked up again. It really felt as if someone was watching. The back of her neck prickled, and she could hear the silence.

Click? She could not do it. Why should she? All these hours she’d spent, making this place her refuge. Give that up with a click? No. She’d created a tiny bit of peace out of her shambles of a life. No way would she ever relive or talk about it again.

Click?

But how could it hurt just to see? “Prevent this from happening to someone else,” it said. She’d never wish her burden on anyone. Could she help instead? She touched her forefinger to the silver mouse. And pushed.

She steeled herself, waiting, not sure what to expect. Could they trace this? Know who she was? Should she close the computer, forget about it, fade to black? Maybe this was the biggest mistake she’d ever made.

She leaned her head back against the top rail of her kitchen chair, crossed her arms, felt the warmth of her bare skin. Briefly closed her eyes. No. The biggest mistake she’d ever made was going to that party.

She shook her head, wondering. It was an odd relief, maybe, to understand that nothing worse could ever happen to her. Maybe that was her power. Isabel paused, fingers poised over her keyboard. Thinking about the phone number now on the screen. Should she call?

The atmosphere of the room changed—a flicker of shadow through the maple tree outside, then a single shaft of light glinted a rainbow on her keyboard, the spectrum of colors changing, dancing, playing across her fingers. Smiling in spite of herself, she looked up to see her little window crystal twisting in the resolute sunshine.

HANK:  I cannot wait for you to find out what happens to Isabel---because she meets my protagonist, reporter Jane Ryland.  

And thank you, every one of you, for your enthusiasm and support and affection. We have each other, we really do.

So again: When a big name author comes to town, or a personal favorite do you go to your local bookstore and see them?  Why and why not?