{"id":5063,"date":"2023-06-13T07:07:23","date_gmt":"2023-06-13T14:07:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=5063"},"modified":"2023-06-13T07:07:23","modified_gmt":"2023-06-13T14:07:23","slug":"megan-abbott-beware-the-woman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/megan-abbott-beware-the-woman\/","title":{"rendered":"Megan Abbott: Beware the Woman"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The Gothic is one of those adjacent genres that fed into the mystery torrent but still manages a fairly strong stream of its own. Many mistresses of mystery like Mignon Eberhardt and\u00a0Daphne du Maurier\u00a0mixed updated elements of the Gothic into their most notable books. An equally notable modern talent, Megan Abbott is nothing if not an aficionado of genre, but her take in her excellent new effort\u00a0Beware the Woman<\/em>\u00a0is not just imitation, but an update and critique of these female centered but male dominated stories.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a sly reference to DuMarier\u2019s\u00a0Rebecca\u00a0<\/em>here, what with the \u201cancestral\u201d home, the secretive haunted husband and the ambiguous housekeeper, and the set-up is totally classic, a young woman alone in a strange, dark house, vaguely menaced and quickly discovering her lack of agency in the situation. Usually things are accelerated by some natural disaster, often a storm that knocks out telephone and power, plunging everything into a more perilous and less civilized world, with dangerous secrets unfolding in the dark. But Abbot doesn\u2019t need all that \u2013 she has the U.P.<\/p>\n

Yes,\u00a0Beware the Woman<\/em>\u00a0is set in Michigan\u2019s very own beloved Upper Peninsula, not exactly a natural disaster but certainly a natural challenge to cell phone use, consistent power and getting the hell out of the middle of it in a hurry. The beautiful setting and vast idiosyncrasies of the region are evocatively handled (after reading this book I tried Blue Moon ice cream for the first time and we\u2019re talking about visiting Tahquamenon Falls) and, as readers know from Steve Hamilton, it makes for a vivid backdrop, often becoming a character itself.<\/p>\n

Abbott\u2019s Jacy is a modern woman trapped in an isolated timewarp, leaving the East Coast of today and taking a trip with her hapless husband Jed to meet his extremely patriarchal patriarch at a beloved family vacation home in a place where the boundaries between life and death seem a lot thinner. And, oh, she\u2019s pregnant too, making travel more complicated, and since her father-in-law, the initially avuncular Dr. Ash, is in fact, a doctor and a friend of the only other doctor around, she finds herself losing control of her own body in the name of common sense. At first she\u2019s just an outsider trying to decode the workings of a long running household in an unfamiliar place, but soon, while still trying to not make waves or seem demanding or paranoid, she determines that maybe it\u2019s a place she shouldn\u2019t be. The men do not agree, arguing for the wellbeing of the baby.<\/p>\n

Megan is a great person and a skillful and intelligent writer who I have long admired, and she deserves a big time bestseller as much as anyone, but to market this book as \u201cSummer\u2019s Big Thriller\u201d isn\u2019t quite right, because it\u2019s better than that. Although there are great plot twists here, she doesn\u2019t rat-tat-tat focused scenes like those potboiler producers. Rather, one of her greatest gifts is creating a deeply textured atmosphere of ambiguous dread and some weird kind of pleasure, as evidenced by her audacious and deeply hypnotic TV show\u00a0Dare Me<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Beware The Woman<\/em>\u00a0is a little more restrained, balanced by a dollop of her illustrious predecessors in this territory like\u00a0Jane Eyre<\/em>. I love this stuff, so if I can be forgiven one even more archaic reference to a book called\u00a0Uncle Silas<\/em>,<\/a> an 1864 publication by J. Sheridan Le Fanu, described these days as a Victorian Gothic mystery-thriller, and the creepiest book I have ever read.\u00a0 This one is right up there though, and Abott\u2019s impressionistic prose creeps forward as everything gets creepier and creepier until all that has been repressed explodes into view. Uncle Silas<\/em> could also be called a ghost story, although in the end (spoiler alert from 1864) there aren\u2019t any real ghosts. Similarly\u00a0Beware the Woman<\/em>\u00a0is about a region haunted by its now diminishing glory and exploitative past, and men haunted by very similar things. I\u2019ve avidly followed Abbott\u2019s writing from her first jaw dropping noir novels to her more recent contemporary cutting edge work, applauding at every step. She\u2019s one of the handful of writers that I still run out and get on the day of publication, and I haven\u2019t been disappointed yet. Don\u2019t\u00a0Beware the Woman\u00a0<\/em>\u2013 snap up her book!\u00a0 —\u00a0Jamie Agnew<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Gothic is one of those adjacent genres that fed into the mystery torrent but still manages a fairly strong stream of its own. Many mistresses of mystery like Mignon Eberhardt and\u00a0Daphne du Maurier\u00a0mixed updated elements of the Gothic into their most notable books. An equally notable modern talent, Megan Abbott is nothing if not … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[1251,1252,79,799,1250,1253],"class_list":["post-5063","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-beware-the-woman","tag-g-p-putnam","tag-gothic","tag-jamie-agnew","tag-megan-abbott","tag-michigan-upper-penninsula"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5063","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5063"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5063\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5067,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5063\/revisions\/5067"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5063"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5063"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5063"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}