Move over, Rosemary - and your baby
A spooky new gothic thriller tells a tale of chicanery, deceit and an ominous pregnancy.
By Kit Reed
Published June 5, 2007
The Nature of Monsters
By Clare Clark
Harcourt, 400 pages, $25
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To drag an impatient, high-tech reader like this one into 18th century England and keep her there, helpless and enthralled, is a triumph. Clare Clark has done it with The Nature of Monsters, her stunning new gothic novel, driven by mystery and drenched with menace. The author has absorbed her research so completely that, instead of getting in the way, her meticulous detail enriches the story.
The novel centers on 16-year-old Eliza Tally, a spirited country girl who gets sold down the river by her heartless mother. The river turns out to be the Thames. Eliza is stuck in a garret that overlooks London's St. Paul's Cathedral.
The squalid, cluttered house is old; its disfigured owner looks older. The cathedral is new. Around it sprawl the buildings destroyed and rebuilt after the 1666 Great Fire.
From the moment she enters that garret, Eliza and her only friend in the world are in terrible danger. The author drops hints along the way, but she never tips her hand. She moves Eliza and her pathetic ward along so swiftly and skillfully that the truth doesn't reveal itself for hundreds of pages.
The style alone is a marvel. Eliza begins: "Afterwards, when I knew that I had not loved him at all, the shock was all in my stomach, like the feeling when you miscount going upstairs in the dark and climb a step that is not there. It was not my heart that was upset but rather my balance. I had not yet learned that it was possible to desire a man so and not love him a little."
Grating expectations
Assuming she can hand her daughter off to the boy's rich family, Eliza's mother fakes a marriage ceremony and, in short order, Eliza is pregnant. She reflects: "Inside me the child twisted like a worm, its marble eyes peering into my private darkness, its hooked claws clutching and squeezing my stomach as, piece by tiny piece, it devoured me."
Her venal mother and the phony groom's father strike a deal, and the girl becomes an indentured servant. Eliza goes along with the plan, thinking her new master will relieve her of her unwanted baby.
Now, this isn't any ordinary London household. It contains Grayson Black, a sinister apothecary with a hideous birthmark, and his vicious wife, who carries on behind his back with his lecherous assistant, Edgar. Then there's Mary, the deformed scullery maid. Not only is Mary, in 21st century terms, intellectually challenged: The unfortunate girl has a facial deformity. Eliza has to share a bed with her.
Believing she won't be pregnant much longer, Eliza puts up with all this, from her sinister master's demands to Mrs. Black's cruelty to the filthy, infested bed she shares with Mary. She'd feel better about it if only she could figure out why Black is so intent on examining the contents of her chamber pot every morning.
Later, the reclusive opium addict will begin to poke and prod her pregnant belly without once offering to solve her "problem." Then the horror begins, and it is real horror.
Mind over matter
"With an awful roar, " Eliza says, "a monster from the depths of Hell hurled its full weight into the room, its chest held out before it like a shield, its front legs aloft. Its teeth mauled the darkness, great streams of slaver looping from its jaws."
The chapters are separated by fragmented documents: letters from Black to his lawyers and his debtors; solemn, quasi-scientific "notes" on his subjects.
Early on, the author re-creates a broadside about a birth anomaly in the mid 17th century. The mother, it seemed, suffered a trauma in her fifth month of pregnancy. The broadside concludes:
"Many questions were on this occasion agitated: viz, about the Power of Imagination & whether this creature was endowed with a human soul; & if not, what became of the soul of the embryo, that was five months old."
To say any more would be criminal. The Nature of Monsters is a spellbinder. Writing with grace and energy, Clark has the power to pull her readers into the deep past and hold them prisoner long after the story ends.