The Dire Days of Willowweep Manor
Written by Shaenon K. Garrity & Illustrated by Christopher J. Baldwin
McElderry Books, 2021
224 pages
Middle-Grade
For those who have read gothic romance and fallen to the allure of those paintings of frightened women fleeing from an ancient mansion on the cliffs, this parody is for you!
Reprimanded for doing yet a fourth book report on Wuthering Heights, Haley trudges home in the rain and discovers a man drowning. What’s a heroic young head-in-the-clouds young woman to do? She dives in and saves him. But the banks of the river she pulls him to are not her own. She awakes in the stately manor called Willowweep, where dwell three brothers: Montague, whom she saved from his escape attempt; Cuthbert, the wanton youngest brother; and the current Lord of the Manor, Laurence.
“Mistress is no longer with us.”
Haley becomes the Gothic Heroine and meets Wilhelmina, the foreboding housekeeper, and Cecily, the Willowweep ghost, then in Bloodwolf Forest she learns of the family curse. The romance-obsessed protagonist finds she has been pulled into a “gasket universe,” (that is, a world wedged between two other realities,) that was constructed by the Elder Gods (well, a stern governess at least,) to keep a Universe of Penultimate Evil from consuming ours.
The eternal curse is that they must care for the Infernal Device that keeps the two realities from crashing destructively into one another and the dark secret… that it is coming apart. Entities native to the gasket appear as the characters of a novel because of small leaks the device has already started to spring.
“A good dark secret is, I don’t know, a shocking murder! Or a mad relation in the attic! Or someone being the lost heir to something!”
The fissures in the gasket universe are being caused by something trying to get in from the world it was built to keep in check. The personification of the viral contagion called the bile, appears as a Mad Monk with accompanying powers from the evil world. He is corruption personified. His poisonous bile starts to consume Willowweep and bend the minds of its inhabitants. If it is successful at contaminating the gasket and breaks through to our world, it would be apocalyptic.
Haley discovers a woman named Sibyl living at the Hermitage (that has Baleful Catacombs beneath, of course,) who used to be in charge of fixing the infernal device that is now breaking faster than the three brothers can repair it. Then Laurence is stabbed by the Mad Monk! Haley falls under the world during the final confrontation while the Infernal Device is close to bursting at the seams!
The characterization covers all the tropes it can while providing a unique science fiction twist to the classic gothic genre. The artwork was excellent, in the modern style, yet I must say the virus was reminiscent of Richard Corben’s most vile. (Don’t look that up, trust me.) The mad monk is horrifying, and the heroine resourceful and tough enough to meet the challenge.
As a fan of Wuthering Heights, Rebecca, and Jane Eyre, I had a great time with this serious adventure mixed with creative parody. The men are bumbling, the women are strong (especially Wilhelmina), and the bile is a suitably insurmountable challenge. (Chapter 5 is titled “All is Lost” for you fans of literary deconstruction.) I will be looking for more work from this author!