Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

So here's my problem with gothic literature: it's so habitually grotesque that it's predictable. If there's not incest, there's a crazy wife in the attic. If there's not a crazy wife in the attic, there's a murderous illegitimate son who's not right in the head. Or conjoined twins. Or a dying gypsy's curse. Or something equally unsettling. So even if you guess the HEP Big Secret wrong, whatever it actually is isn't going to make a dent. B/c you've already imaged the worst. B/c gothic. ALSO . . . I don't like it. If I lived in the time of traveling freak shows, I would not attend. Not my bag. You: So why did you read it? Me: B/c didn't realize it was gothic until I'd already started it. You: Why didn't you quit? Me: SCHADENFREUDE . #thestruggleisreal Plus, the concept is friggin amazing: England's most beloved author, who's written 56 novels in 56 years, has zealously guarded her privacy. She made her pen name her legal name, and has threatened any would-be biographers with lawsuits until they backed down. Interviewing her has become a kind of rite of passage for journalists, b/c she gives a different version of her life story to every, single one of them. <------how cool is that? But now she's dying, so she contacts our MC (Margaret), an amateur biographer who's grown up in her father's rare bookshop (a bibliophile's DREAM), and employs Margaret to write her life story before she leaves this mortal coil. After that is when it gets weird. And gross. And creepy. And messed-the-eff-up. Man alive, these people are CRAZY. Including Margaret, who has an unhealthy fixation on her dead-shortly-after-birth twin sister. Genre preferences aside, there's no denying that this is a beautifully written book: There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic. It's also mindbendingly clever. The line between mental illness and the supernatural is so thin, so frail, so indecipherable, that even now, days later, I can't stop thinking about it--were the ghosts real, or did they only exist in her mind? I. DON'T. KNOW. *EDVARD MUNCH FACE* THE THIRTEENTH TALE by Diane Setterfield is not a book you read then forget. It stays with you, taking up brain space, whispering incessantly, like the five notes of a song you can't place, but can't escape. It's beautiful and terrible. And even if you avoid gothic novels like I do, this one . . . This one deserves to be made an exception. Highly recommended (with trepidation).