Live Bytes says hello and welcome to author JL Merrow joining us today to talk about the re release of Wight Mischief

JL talks about gothic in a guestpost and also brought a giveaway you can participate in!

Welcome JL 🙂

Gothic Love Affair

 

Hi, I’m JL Merrow, and I’m delighted to be here today as part of the blog tour to celebrate the release of Wight Mischief, a romantic suspense novel set on the island I grew up on, the Isle of Wight.

 

Today I’d like to talk about my love affair with all things gothic.

 

It’s funny how you can see different things in a book when you come back to it a few years after you first read it—or even a few years after you first wrote it.

 

Wight Mischief has been described as having more than a touch of gothic about it, and looking at it now, I can clearly see how the book was influenced by my love of gothic literature. With mysterious and possibly ghostly goings-on, a sinister guardian and a lonely retreat perched high upon a cliff, it could hardly be more gothic if I’d been trying!

 

My favourite gothic author is someone I suspect (although I’d love to be proven wrong!) few readers will have heard of, much less read her books: Ann Radcliffe. I first discovered her novels when reading Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey—which, as anyone who’s read it will know, pokes fun at the whole gothic genre, with its impossibly talented heroines and melodramatic scenes. A book that features heavily in Northanger Abbey, with the (determinedly ordinary) heroine and her friends gushing over it like modern-day teenagers over Twilight*, is Mrs Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho.

 

Since I’m just that geeky over books—I’m that sad sort who always reads the introduction and the notes—I naturally had to get hold of a copy of Udolpho. And I rather liked it. Yes, it displays some of the traits Miss Austen mocked, but it also has a wealth of beautiful imagery, and displays a talent for bringing out the macabre, the foreboding, in every scene.

 

Quick and totally inadequate introduction to the convoluted plot of Udolpho: our heroine, Emily, loses her parents and her fortune in quick succession, and winds up with a sinister Italian** guardian, who tries to forcibly marry her to his mate, while she pines for her true love, Valancourt. Emily is taken to the remote castle of—you guessed it—Udolpho, which abounds in secret passages, kidnap attempts, and a possible Bluebeard situation. There are also ghosts, nuns***, a shipwreck, pirates, bandits, strange coincidences and mysterious inheritances. Amongst other stuff.

 

Exhausted yet? Clearly I wasn’t, as I then went on to enjoy Mrs Radcliffe’s other books, The Romance of the Forest, A Sicilian Romance, and my personal favourite, The Italian.****

 

The thing about Ann Radcliffe’s gothic romances is that, while any attempt at summarising the plots makes them sound like lurid pot-boilers, they don’t read like that at all—although it’s worth noting that she was, if you believe Wikipedia, the highest paid professional author of the 1790s: the Anne Rice or Stephenie Meyer of her day. Written as they were in the late 18^th century, the novels move at what seems to modern readers a sedate pace, with time for lush descriptions of European countryside. Parts of them are, very literally, a Claude Lorrain landscape in print; in those pre-internet days, and lacking the funds to travel before her novels took off, she had to rely on paintings to tell her what her locations looked like.

 

And her genius lay in putting her own spin on those descriptions to evoke a sense of foreboding and terror in the reader. Ann Radcliffe was very keen on the distinction between terror (worrying something nasty’s going to happen) and horror (watching something nasty in full swing), the latter of which she disliked as tending to close the mind rather than stimulate it. The complex, tortured villain of The Italian, Father Schedoni, was written as a direct response to the gruesome horrors perpetrated (and ultimately, suffered) by Matthew Lewis’s Ambrosio in The Monk. We can only guess what she’d have made of modern-day horror movies.

 

Despite the damsel-in-distress nature of many of her heroines, there is a strong element of feminism in Radcliffe’s work. She expanded the role of women in literature, her heroines at least equal to the male heroes, and always overcoming the male villains, and her books, although supportive of traditional moral values, always advocated for women’s rights.

 

 

*See Val McDermid’s excellent updating of Northanger Abbey

** Mrs Radcliffe had a bit of a thing about Italians.

***And nuns.

****See what I mean about Italians?

 

 

Question: Are you with Ann Radcliffe on the terror/horror debate? Do you prefer subtle gothic menace in your fiction—or out and out horror?

 

I’m offering a prize of a $10 Dreamspinner Press gift certificate to one lucky commenter on the tour, who will be randomly chosen on Friday 15^th June. Good luck!

Wight Mischief

 

A ghost of a chance at love.

Personal trainer Will Golding has been looking forward to a getaway with his best friend, Baz, a journalist researching a book on ghosts. But on the first day of their camping trip on the Isle of Wight, Will takes a walk on a secluded beach and spies a beautiful young man skinny-dipping by moonlight.  Ethereally pale, he’s too perfect to be real—or is he?

Lonely author Marcus Devereux is just as entranced by the tall athlete he encounters on the beach, but he’s spent the years since his parents’ violent death building a wall around his heart, and the thought of letting Will scale it is terrifying. Marcus’s albinism gives him his otherworldly appearance and leaves him reluctant to go out in daylight, his reclusiveness encouraged by his guardian—who warns him to stay away from Will and Baz.

The attraction between Will and Marcus can’t be denied—but neither can the danger of the secrets haunting Marcus’s past, as one “accident” after another strikes Will and Baz. If they don’t watch their step, they could end up added to the island’s ghostly population.

Available in ebook and paperback from Dreamspinner Press

AMAZON

Wight Mischief was previously published by Samhain, but has been completely re-edited and given a lovely new cover for this second edition by Dreamspinner Press.

 

 

JL Merrow is that rare beast, an English person who refuses to drink tea.  She read Natural Sciences at Cambridge, where she learned many things, chief amongst which was that she never wanted to see the inside of a lab ever again.

 

She writes (mostly) contemporary gay romance and mysteries, and is frequently accused of humour.  Two of her novels have won Rainbow Awards for Romantic Comedy (Slam!, 2013 and Spun!, 2017) and several of her books have been EPIC Awards finalists, including Muscling Through, Relief Valve (the Plumber’s Mate Mysteries) and To Love a Traitor.

JL Merrow is a member of the Romantic Novelists’ Association, International Thriller Writers, Verulam Writers and the UK GLBTQ Fiction Meet organising team.

 

Find JL Merrow online at: https://jlmerrow.com/, on Twitter as @jlmerrow, and on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/jl.merrow