It’s the height of the Industrial Revolution, and ten years into Lenore’s marriage to steel magnate Henry, their marriage is basically in name only. Unable to bear Henry an heir, Lenore has fallen into a resigned depression, not helped by the severe cramps that every month brings. (Lenore ignores that “every month” seems to translate into “non-stop”.) When Henry’s ambitions to be excepted in society as more than nouveau riche drive him to purchase an estate in the remote British moorlands, a shocking carriage accident brings the mysterious Carmilla into their lives. Carmilla, who is weak and pale during the day but vibrant at night. Carmilla, who stirs something deep within Lenore. Carmilla, who seems to hate everyone but Lenore. (Though to be frank, in the first part of the book, I wonder how she doesn’t dislike Lenore.)
Soon, local girls begin to fall sick, consumed by a terrible hunger, and Lenore begins to unravel. Torn between regaining her husband’s affection (and obeying society’s expectations) and the cravings Carmilla has awakened, Lenore must confront a darkness that will place her at risk. (Seeing as this is a feminist book, you won’t be too surprised to discover the darkness is not Carmilla.)
Poor Lenore Crowther, so terribly sad about the inconvenience of her own murder.
I simultaneously read this book at the absolute worst time in my life and the absolute best time in my life. The weekend I read this I was stretched to the limit with a male of my acquaintance deciding that setting me off was what he needed to do most in his life; and then I read this book, and I burned. This is not a book to read if you are a woman in any way dissatisfied with her life; this is Martina McBride’s When God-Fearing Women Get the Blues and the H.L. Mencken quote
if it said “normal woman”, and if the narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper turned it outwards, and if Bertha Rochester was let out of that attic (and if Jane Eyre had a normal reaction to Rochester wanting to be a bigamist), and Paris Paloma’s Labour, and the rage of the Furies rolled into one and unleashed. How society holds women down and weakens them, while simultaneously freeing them because society knows how women act, and any evidence to the contrary is simply glossed over because it is just NOT DONE. I think it also had the smallest touch of American Dreamer in it, but I can’t tell you why I feel that way (the 1984 one with Tom Conti and JoBeth Williams, not the one with Peter Dinklage and Shirley McClaine.) I loved Carmilla in Sheridan LeFanu’s work (I had to; I’ve read it twice, once in a stand-alone book, once in a collection LeFanu’s short stories), and I love her here. To be honest, Carmilla, as little as she’s honestly in the book, was my favorite character for a large part of it. Lenore was enjoyable, albeit a little stuffy and prim and proper, but became even more enjoyable when she started to loosen her corset strings (metaphorically) and rage and want.
Oh! A scene. How dreadful. Why, that’s simply the worst thing any person could ever do.
Henry, I wanted dead from the minute he appeared on the page; I wanted Lenore to take one of her tins of pastilles and shove them down his throat until he choked.
I could take the tin and stave his head in-smash the fragile bone of temple and jaw, flatten his nose and split his lip, crack him in two and find out if there is a heart in his body. No. That is impractical. It would not be strong enough.
And oh, the pastilles; between pastilles here and tea in Crimson Peak, if I was anywhere near England during the Industrial Revolution, I would supply all my own foodstuffs. I wonder if (I hope that) Lenore (and guest; I’d say who, but that might be a spoiler) will stay in the wonderfully, creepily Gothic Nethershaw after seeing the world. Though seeing as Lenore is rapidly tired of needing to play the perfect hostess and take care of everything, I’m not 100% sure if she would.
I am in a house full of adults, and not a single thing would get done if I did not urge it into being.
I would also keep the pack of hounds that Henry bought, but that’s just me. It’s not just in sinister goings-on that this book reminded me of Crimson Peak; the way Nethershaw is described I half expected to see either Lucille or Thomas Sharpe in one of the hallways. (Though Lenore is not quite as passive as Edith, Henry is no Thomas, and Carmilla has far more going for her than Alan.) I can see the Great Expectations allusions in the text, which connect to another rather large pain in Lenore’s life; her great-aunt. It’s not too far to say that Carmilla, and (maybe, possibly, within reason) Cora are the two people who actually, honestly care for Lenore for her own sake, not what she can do for them. This book has also booted me up the rear end into picking up copies of Christabel, The Woman in White, and The Moonstone; I have been wanting to read them for a while, and this book has just caused that to go into hyper drive. I also have plans to pick up Dunn’s Rottenheart sooner rather than later; a gender-swapped retelling of Hamlet sounds like something I need. (At least I’m assuming it will be less of a miscarriage of Shakespeare than Lady Macbeth was.) If nothing else tells you the time period this is set in (and the horrible working conditions in the steel factory would clue you in), is that Henry attempts to employ the tried and true habit of all men with wives they can’t control; the call to Bedlam for a transport. May I say, at the end of the book, there are a lot of people who are probably going to be wondering what they’re supposed to do now, Bedlam just being the start of that list. Hungerstone is also a cautionary tale of how women clinging to the mores of and becoming too entrenched in society can lead to their deaths (as well as mild insanity in some people, and extreme possessive jealousy in others.) I am glad that I read this; in fact, this was a book that as soon as I closed the back cover, I was partially tempted to turn around and start reading it all over again, and to me, that is the mark of a good book. The writing is superb; Dunn manages to capture the writing style of the time period of Carmilla, or The Turn of the Screw (which, aside here: I loathed when I read it), or Jane Eyre, or other similar English Gothic novels. The ending? What can I say except
Plus, Dunn name checks Maria Marten and the Red Barn Murder Case, and in the Author’s Note, says part of what caused her to write this was Judith Flanders’s The Invention of Murder, which I also loved; and for some strange reason I get a thrill when I see that authors whose books I enjoy have similar literary tastes t me.
If you want a tale of pure, unadulterated feminist rage, I can not recommend this highly enough.
