The Blackened Cottage is a beautifully conceived and executed gothic novel by A. E. Richards.
Richards
has managed to interweave all of the excruciatingly bleak, painful, and
horrific elements of the classic gothic novel into her new book. The
heroine, Lisabeth Cutteridge has been moved by her father to a gloomy
cottage in the woods, far from civilization. Lisabeth is lonely and
terrified by her father's descent into madness. Because her mother has
disappeared from their lives, Lisabeth is bound to her father, despite
his madness, in order to care for her young brother, Eddie. An odd
disfigured girl named Bethan is her only friend, a true friend who comes
to her rescue after Charles Cutteridge sends Eddie to London to
boarding school and imprisons Lisabeth to force her marriage to a
repulsive Frenchman, Jean Bernard. Lisabeth runs away through the woods,
escaping not only her father but also a madwoman living in the woods
who believes Lisabeth to be her long dead daughter. Lisabeth catches the
eye of a psychopath whose intentions for her are deadly dark but
manages to escape to London with the help of an itinerant preacher and
his servant, Jojo. The
atmosphere created in the book is gloomy and horrific. Our emotional and
imperiled heroine suffers from nightmares and a past she cannot
remember and encounters madness and evil at every turn
in her quest for escape and peace. Will Lisabeth ever find the true
escape that she craves or will she spend the rest of her life running
from both real and imagined horrors until her life ends in tragedy?
No comments:
Post a Comment