Maplecroft Review

This week's novel is Maplecroft by Cherie Priest.  It was recommended by the Writing Excuses podcast as an example of an epistolary narrative.

A sickness has crept into the town of Fall River, where people hear an eerie call from the ocean, where they change to become unresponsive, sensitive to light, their bodies bloating and their skin becoming translucent.  They grow gills and move in jerks.  Eventually they turn against their families and escape to the water.  Unless their families defend themselves, which is what Lizzie did the night she killed her father and step-mother with an ax.  When the sickness returns, Lizzie--now a social pariah--is the only one who can protect the town.

This is a fictionalized retelling of the story of Lizzie Borden, who was charged and acquitted of killing her parents with an ax in a big brouhaha in the 1890s.  But I don't think that adds anything to the story and detracts from it a bit in that it's kind of uncomfortable to see a true crime portrayed as "no, monsters did it!"  I guess no one is really harmed by fictionalizing these events, but the serial numbers could have very easily scraped off, and I would have enjoyed it just fine.

The chapters are mostly diary entries.  They allow for candid discussions of what the characters feel, especially when they're being petty and delusional and unsympathetic.  The diary entries give rise to incredible honesty that I don't think the narrative could have achieved except through using a first person narrative and switching every chapter to a different character.  And even then, a diary is naturally a place for self-reflection, so the simple first person might not have dove as deeply.  It allows the characters to express jealousy that other characters don't pick up on.  It allows characters to slowly lose touch with reality or worry that they're losing touch with reality.

The main thing I looked at in this book was something I've been thinking about for a while.  I have a critique partner who's of the school of thought that people don't remember conversations verbatim enough to write them in a letter or a diary.  Whereas, I'm of the school of thought that of course I don't remember things exactly as they happened.  Who cares?  I'm going to fill in the gaps to make a good story, and whoever's listening will know that and get the gist of what really happened.  So I've been trying to find some middle ground where I can write like I want without my critique partner tackling me. 

In Maplecroft, the events toward the end of the book--the climax and leading up to it--are detailed in a way that my friend would probably flag.  However, early in the story the writers use qualifiers and only scattered descriptions of things they would definitely remember.  (And these make those details all the more powerful by contrast.  Like how the smell of the monsters is awful and there are long descriptions of what it smells like that make you understand, not just by the comparisons made, but by the fact that they're going on and on about it, that it's disgusting.)  As the story picks up, I was swept up in the horror and suspense enough that I wanted to hear about fight scenes in all their glory.  I wanted to hear the conversations that spelled out their working theories of the sickness.  I didn't notice when it became less realistically epistolary because it was giving me what I wanted.  It's the quick pacing that makes this work.  It's exciting and creepy and I wanted to keep reading.  In the end, I still had questions and everything didn't fit together neatly, but I was reading so fast that I didn't care.

Another thing the form has going for it that lets it push at the boundaries of realistic diary entries is that, even when they're being detailed about dialogue or action scenes or monster descriptions, the entires still have a sharp voice that's different for each character.  The voice is still there, and that roots us to the diary format.

Furthermore, there's also something to be said about this being set in the 1890s when everyone was an avid journaler, and that most of the characters are scientists striving to record their observations in as much detail as possible.

***

Next week: The Privilegeof the Sword, YA fantasy by Ellen Kushner