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Books and Bites
JCPL librarians bring you book recommendations and discuss the bites and beverages to pair with them.
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Carrie: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Books and Bites podcast. Each month we bring you book recommendations and discuss the bites and beverages to pair with them. I'm Carrie Green and I'm here with my co-hosts Michael Cunningham and Jacqueline Cooper.
Michael: Hello.
Jacqueline: Welcome.
Carrie: This month we're discussing Gothic novels, one of the prompts on the Books and Bites Bingo reading challenge.
And I know of all the prompts we've talked about so far this is probably the one nearest and dearest to Michael's heart.
Michael: Yes, I've been waiting for this prompt all year. Oh yeah?
Jacqueline: Do you feel like it's scary enough, though? The Gothic fiction seemed like less scary than anything.
Michael: Well, I mean, your standard Gothic, stereotypical Gothic, you know, maybe not so scary, but you know, a lot of them do have that either kind of supernatural element or suggestion to them.
But then you have some Gothics that really lean into that horror, too, that can be really scary.
Jacqueline: Yeah.
Michael: Because Gothic is definitely, you can have that as a [00:01:00] subgenre of horror itself, so.
Carrie: Yeah, it seems like Gothic fiction encompasses a lot of different genres, so like you said, it could be horror, it could be romance, like Northanger Abbey, which was also kind of a satire of Gothic fiction, could be southern fiction, there's a Southern Gothic,
Jacqueline: psychological,
Michael: oh I love southern gothic, yeah,
Carrie: mhm, mhm.
So what are some of the things that, you know, make a book Gothic, even within all those different genres? How do you know it's Gothic fiction?
Michael: A lot of times, some of the usual tropes you see are a crumbling manor, a dysfunctional family with dark secrets. Usually a female protagonist, maybe in distress or someone looking for like in Jane Eyre.
That would be [00:02:00] considered Gothic, you know, because Roderick, what was his name? Was it Roderick?
No, not Roderick.
Carrie: I can't remember. But like brooding characters.
Michael: Brooding characters, yeah.
Jacqueline: Yeah, usually
there's like a haunting as well, or some kind of presence. It might not be a real haunting, but they, they feel like there's a presence in the house or, or something that's sinister or lurking there.
Even if it's real or imagined.
Carrie: Mm hmm.
When I was talking about Northanger Abbey and the characters, were excited about if the novels were horrid enough.
Jacqueline: Yeah.
Carrie: So I do think that is an element of Gothic fiction too, like, is it a little sensationalist, you know, something that is a little bit thrilling because it's so, horrid.
Michael: Yeah. Another one that came to mind like Interview with the Vampire, you know, vampires are very gothic. And so, you know, there's always that, kind of sexy [00:03:00] sensual thing that surrounds them. You know, when you've got a Gothic romance.
Carrie: Mm hmm. We have several Gothic novels for you to choose from today. There's also a list on the Books and Bites bingo page of other Gothic novels.
So, you should be able to find something to read for this prompt if you're, if you're still looking to fill this one.
So the book I chose is Oh Caledonia! by Elspeth Barker. If you are looking for a novel to read during a windstorm like the one we experienced last spring, especially when the electricity is out and the wind is howling down the chimney, look no further. I know from experience that Oh Caledonia has more than enough gothic vibes for that situation.
Originally published in 1991, O [00:04:00] Caledonia was republished in 2022 with an introduction by Maggie O'Farrell, author of Hamnet. It's a little known classic that, according to the publisher, " has been compared to the works of the Brontes, Edgar Allan Poe, and Edward Gorey." O'Caledonia opens with the death of 16 year old Janet, who has been murdered in her family's dilapidated castle in the Scottish Highlands. Except for her pet Jackdaw, which I think is similar to a crow,
nobody seems to miss her much. Her family wants her quickly buried and forgotten. What follows is not a traditional mystery. Instead, the book goes back in time to tell the story of her sad and misunderstood life, beginning with her birth in World War II era Scotland. At first, while her father is away at war, she and her mother live with her grandparents near the sea.
Janet feels beloved by her [00:05:00] grandfather, and especially her grandmother, and close to her little brother, Francis. But then her grandmother dies, and her mother has another baby. When their mother leaves the baby outside with the two young children, they try to hide her with dirt and leaves. It's just the beginning of Janet being told that she, " can't be trusted, "
the beginning of the sibling rivalries that leave Janet feeling unloved and separate from the rest of her family. After her father, Hector, returns from the war, he inherits the aforementioned castle from a cousin. It's the typical gothic, derelict castle, complete with a woman in the attic. In this case, the cousin's widow, Lila, an eccentric Russian émigré who has nowhere else to go.
Hector lets her stay, even though Janet's mother despises her. Like Janet, Lila prefers to spend much of her time outside. In her case, studying plants and collecting [00:06:00] specimens. Lila is one of the few people Janet can talk to, especially after her mother has two more daughters she clearly favors. However, Lila is an alcoholic who drinks her remaining money away, and Janet's mother is intent on forcing her to move.
Throughout a life of feeling bullied and unloved, Janet finds solace in books and the outdoors, identifying more with animals than people. " Here was comfort," she thinks as she nuzzles her pony. "Here was communion. ". At the same time, the book is filled with descriptions of people's cruelties to animals,
cruelties that they regularly bestow on Janet as well, a girl who isn't willing to fit herself into the conventional roles of her gender. You do eventually find out who killed Janet, and it is every bit as brutal as you'd expect from a gothic novel. But ultimately, this book is a character study, primarily of [00:07:00] Janet, but also of all the people who fail her.
This atmospheric, witty, lyrical novel is filled with surprising descriptions. Here's one of my favorites, from when a very young Janet goes to a tea for wounded veterans. One of them says her name doesn't suit her, and he'll call her Beth instead. Janet thinks it's, "A beautiful name, a velvet name, brownish mauve."
The veterans' tea is one of the few nice experiences in Janet's short life, where she finds that, " Even those wild tattooed men were as homely and douce with their scones and jam as the fat bellied tea cozies clothing the brown teapots. " Naturally, you should pair O'Caledonia with scones and jam.
I suppose I should be saying scons since this is a Scottish book. So pair it with scons and jam. [00:08:00] There's a recipe for cinnamon scons in Outlander Kitchen: The Official Outlander Companion Cookbook. But if you're dairy free like me, you might want to try the vegan version. Buttery Scottish tea time scones from the blog, Tinned Tomatoes.
We'll link to the recipe on our website.
Jacqueline: There seems to be a, a lot of cruelty in that book.
Carrie: Yeah, there, there was. And it was kind of a difficult read because of that, but the language was so beautiful and the insight into Janet's character was really compelling. So, and it's not, like, violent for the most part.
It's more, like, you know, emotional cruelty, which is still, I mean, which is still bad, but yeah, it just really made me think about the ways that, that young [00:09:00] girls who do not fit the mold that society wants can be, basically, you know, totally forgotten about and discarded in ways. You know, there was even this quote about, which I didn't, I didn't include.
It was kind of like a darkly humorous quote about how the locals, they certainly weren't going to blame the murderer for what happened to Janet. They were, they were going to blame Janet for what happened to Janet, you know? And I mean, that's something that we still, like women in the Me Too movement still deal with today, so.
Jacqueline: Or just locking them up in the attic.
Michael: Yeah.
Jacqueline: Like how many, it seems like that must have happened a lot in real life because it's in so many books.
Carrie: Right.
Jacqueline: I just wonder how many women were actually just locked up because the husband didn't want to deal with them anymore
Michael: or just at home, but in cycle, you [00:10:00] know, mental institutes for.
Everything, just about anything you could, you know, institutionalize. Yeah,
Jacqueline: just locked them up and forgot about them. Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Okay. So I, I noticed that, oh, is it, did you all notice that there were a lot of times that in the gothic genre that it does seem to be the women is the protagonist overall.
Carrie: Mm hmm.
Michael: Yeah.
Jacqueline: Yeah.
Carrie: Yeah. I'm sure. I mean, there must be, but it is, it is hard to, to think of them. I think a lot of the authors are maybe women too.
Jacqueline: I think I was reading that maybe that was a way that they could express themselves where they really couldn't do it in the past, you know, they were able to use this literature as a way to express themselves.
Michael: Use the gothic genre to talk about maybe some hard, tough topics or explore
those.
Jacqueline: Or what was happening to them, [00:11:00] like the Me Too type stuff, situations that they couldn't really talk about. I think we should definitely read that one.
Carrie: It also, if you're attracted to books by their cover. Which, who isn't? It has a really great cover.
So, you know, just check it out for the cover alone and you'll want to read it. It has this picture, an image of, like a girl's face. And then there's this huge jackdaw, like, right next to her. It's kind of, it has that, like, creepy, moody, cool vibe
to it.
Jacqueline: I'm guilty of judging a book by its cover often.
Carrie: Aren't we all?
Michael: Well, I found this in this, in this book called Paperbacks from Hell, which is kind of a little history of the horror paperbacks from like the 70s and 80s. And there was, talking about the gothic literature of the time, this guy, his name was Zeal. He painted more than 40 covers for, [00:12:00] like, gothic paperbacks.
And they always featured an intrepid brunette or terrified blonde. Lit by the silver light of the moon, wind blown hair, ebony sky. And like, maybe mysterious mist and some dismal real estate in the background, maybe with a light, one light on and upstairs window.
Carrie: Then it kind of shifted to glimmering vampires, right?
Jacqueline: Have you ever felt strongly about a house and you don't know why, but for some unexplainable reason you feel connected to a presence there or the house? Frost, a young adult novel by Marianna Baer, main character Leena has strong feelings the first time she sees an old two story Victorian house [00:13:00] peeking through a tangle of lilac and evergreen bushes surrounded by trees at the edge of her boarding school, Barcroft Academy.
Suffering from her parents divorce, she depends on her friends to be her family. When she comes across Frost House, she imagines that Frost could be a place where a nice family could live. She thinks she could almost hear a faint whisperer calling her come inside, come inside. So when Leena learns that the Victorian house is a converted four story dorm, she sets her sights on living there with her best friends, Abby and Viv.
Leena cannot believe her luck when she learns that she and her friends are chosen to live there in the small dorm house. However, on moving day, Leena's idyllic fantasy is shattered when she discovers she must share her room with the eccentric art student Celeste. The Academy has assigned Celeste to be Leena's roommate for the first semester.
She has to share Leena's first floor room because she's broken her leg over the [00:14:00] summer. Although things don't seem as bad when Lina meets Celeste's overprotective but cute brother, David, the more time Leena spends around David, the more she finds she likes him. After the girls move in, strange, unexplained events start occurring in the house.
Celeste gets locked in a dark closet, her clothing gets destroyed, and her pictures are knocked off the walls. Celeste makes enemies of them when she accuses Abby and Viv of doing things so she will move out. Lena cannot believe her friends would do these things. As the incidents increase, Lena does not know who to trust.
Who or what is hurting Celeste and destroying her belongings? Suspense builds as the narrator grows increasingly obsessed with the house and insecure in her relationships. The more alienated she is from her friends, the more attached she becomes to the house. As readers, we instinctively know something's not right.[00:15:00]
Something or someone wants Celeste out of the way, but it wants Abby to stay forever. I enjoyed the twists and turns of this fast paced novel. At the beginning of the novel, Baer does an excellent job of foreshadowing the sinister events ahead of them. We know something sinister is going to occur when Leena informs the reader that she realizes luck had nothing to do with her finding Frost House.
If you like Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca, you might enjoy Frost. There are quite a few similarities. For instance, it's told in the same manner the narrator is telling the story of what happened when she lived at Frost House. Baer, like Du Maurier sets the voice, atmosphere, and location at the beginning of the story.
Also, Rebecca's Manderly, like Frost House, is very prominent in the story. Both main characters imagine worst case scenarios at every turn. For her first novel, Baer does an incredible [00:16:00] job of writing a psychological, sinister tale from a very modern angle. I am looking forward to reading more of her writings.
For my recipe, I thought it would only fit in to pair a recipe for Aztec Chili Chocolate Cupcakes, since Leena gives Celeste a chocolate cupcake to win her over. I found a recipe from BettyCrocker. com that looks pretty yummy. I dare you to try this interesting combination when you read Frost.
Carrie: So do you think it was based on that?
Did you say Rebecca? Do you think it was based on Rebecca, or do you think it just had some similarities, like, with the Gothic tropes?
Jacqueline: I think she probably, I felt like she kind of had read, probably read Rebecca, and she was influenced by it. But I also think, as I was reading more about Gothic literature, there, it does seem to be there were a lot of those tropes in there.
But, Rebecca's one of my favorite novels, so, I kept seeing, like, Parts of [00:17:00] it when I was, I was like, Oh, that's a lot like, but very, very different in a way too, that there, you know, like she doesn't really trust the guy she likes. And, and Rebecca, the unnamed woman, they never named the protagonist, Rebecca, she's like doubts her husband and she's not really sure about him.
And then, you know, the house is really forefront. In this one, the house seems to be like a almost like a character in the book. And they eat chili chocolate cupcakes.
Carrie: It's good to have a little chocolate with your gothic. I think, I think those go well. We have scones, we have chocolate. Hope you have a dessert paired with yours, Michael.
Jacqueline: Oh no.
I see Michael as a Bloody Mary type of guy.
Michael: Bloody Marys?
Jacqueline: Yeah. I [00:18:00] don't know.
Michael: This month, I read Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno Garcia. You might recall that I read her gripping noir Velvet was the Night early this year, but this was the book that was her breakout and put her on Best Seller lists when it was released back in 2020. It was described to me as Lovecraft meets Wuthering Heights, which immediately sold me.
In 1955 Mexico, we are introduced to Noemi, a young independent socialite as she is called home by her father while attending a costume party. Her father informs her that he has received a distressing letter from her cousin Catalina, who had not long ago hastily married a man named Virgil Doyle and now resides at the Doyle's secluded manse, High Place, located deep in the Mexican mountains.
Her rambling, incoherent letter mentions ghosts and something about [00:19:00] Virgil trying to poison her. Noemi's father asks her to travel to High Place to see what is actually going on with Catalina. She finds that High Place is a crumbling manor situated on top of a mist shrouded mountain. She's greeted by Florence Doyle and her son Francis, and introduced to the rest of the Doyle family at dinner that night.
Virgil, Catalina's husband, and Howard, a decrepit old man and the patriarch of the Doyle family who's mostly confined to bed because of an old wound that never properly healed. She notices almost immediately that something is wrong with the house and the family and fears for her cousin, who's been confined to a room in bed and suffering from quote unquote tuberculosis according to the family's doctor.
Noemi, while her sister rests during the day, roams the house and grounds where she slowly uncovers some of the family's history and dark secrets with the help of Francis Doyle, who has taken quite a liking to her. She finds out the family used to be wealthy because of the silver mines they ruthlessly operated, but now lie abandoned [00:20:00] after the revolution.
And she learns about a past tragedy where Howard's daughter, Ruth, commits mass murder on the eve of her wedding to her cousin that wipes out most of the Doyle family. And she also finds out about their strange fascination with fungi. Noemi also starts to question her own sanity as she starts having vivid nightmares that include Virgil and his deceased daughter, Ruth.
Noemi being in a hostile environment and willing to do anything for her family is undeterred and vows to get Catalina out of high place, which puts her on a path that leads to deadly secrets that Doyle will do anything to keep buried in the mountain. This book is very much a slow burn most of the way through, but it sets up a fast paced and cathartic ending.
It does include all the usual staples of a gothic novel. A creepy and crumbling manor, a reclusive family with dark secrets, and possibly supernatural happenings. But is able to use those to tell a story that tackles big and heavy subjects like abuse and trauma, [00:21:00] colonialism, exploitation of Indigenous populations, eugenics, and even misogyny.
And it does all this with an added hallucinatory fever dream quality that lurks in the background. So if you're looking for an atmospheric Gothic novel, that's socially conscious and leans into its horror elements, then I highly recommend Mexican Gothic. Since fungi plays a major role in this story, I decided I had to include a dish featuring delicious mushroom.
Personally, I love them. My family, not so much. Sautéed, fried, doesn't really matter. They just about make any dish better. This is a recipe for garlic mushrooms that can be found on the website CafeDelights. com. It calls for button mushrooms, unsalted butter, olive oil, garlic, herbs, and salt and pepper.
Super easy to make and goes with just about anything. I served them with New York strips one night.
Jacqueline: Mushrooms can be kind of sinister too.
Carrie: I was just going to say, it's funny that you [00:22:00] mentioned that because my book, Lila, the woman in the attic, she also grew mushrooms in the, in the novel. And she would, if I'm remembering correctly, I think she actually grew them
in the castle, because it was like so damp and, you know, you could grow mushrooms there. But yeah, so mushrooms.
Michael: Yeah, I have just, while I'm reading this, I found out there's a whole new sub genre horror called Fungi Horror.
Carrie: What?
Michael: There's actually another one, it's a retelling of The Fall of the House of Usher by T.
Kingfisher. But there's apparently, the fungi is a huge part of that story too. So, yeah.
Carrie: I wonder if it's because, I mean, there are some mushrooms that are really deadly, so I wonder if that can, if that is the connection, that poison idea.
Michael: Yeah. Not, not in this story so much. There's like a parasitical thing, [00:23:00] and like a...
where they bring up where fungi almost has like a I don't say like a consciousness, but like they can, I don't know what the term is that for, but you know, they can almost feel what's going on like a, like a,
Carrie: well, a lot of them, you know, are like underground and like connected, like vast distances and you, you don't even realize it.
Michael: Yes. Yes. It plays with that a lot.
Jacqueline: And mushrooms just pop up out of, like, one day it rains and all of a sudden there's like ten mushrooms.
Michael: Yeah. And like a lot of them grow, you know, I guess maybe rebirth or, you know, from decomposition.
Jacqueline: Mm hmm. In woods. Yeah. And a lot of times woods are considered creepy and...
I don't know. I think there's, we could do a mushroom study.
Michael: Is that our prompt for next year? Fungi? Fungi?[00:24:00]
Carrie: Thanks for listening to the Books and Bites podcast. To learn more about Books and Bites Bingo, visit us at jesspublib.org/books-bites. Our theme music is The Breakers from the album In Close Quarters with the Enemy by Scott Whiddon. You can learn more about Scott and his music at his website adoreforadesk. com.