08-09-2010, 08:01 PM
(08-09-2010, 08:05 AM)Charybdis Wrote: One thing I might add would be that the gothic isn't primarily focused on action. It's more about conversations. Even silent conversations with herself, I guess. I've never paid much attention to this before, but in the last couple of books I read I noticed the heroine checking off every suspect, contemplating means and motive. I'm not sure that I like that very much, though.
Yes! That's such an astute observation and says something about the genre, I think. At its best, the Gothic suspense novel (especially told in first person) is like a running personal account by the protagonist, yet reads like a story instead of a monologue.
I am noticing this very much right now, while reading Dark Inheritance by Carola Salisbury. Brilliant book! Everything in the story is inherently filtered through the thoughts and personality of the heroine narrating it, but the prose never gets bogged down in interior monologues. She lays out the events, then reacts to them; her thoughts as she contemplates her next move are, in many cases, the "action" of the story, as much as the moves themselves. The author makes us understand how the character arrives at each move, with a sense of inevitability. Salisbury (a.k.a. Mike Butterworth) is a cut above!
