By Arlene Hale, ©1970
Cover illustration by
Charles Gehm
Nurse Jean Reese took
her new job at Webb House with some misgivings. The somber old mansion at
Shadow Lake was a house of menace. Each of its occupants seemed to have a
secret life—a private, closely hidden world not to be shared. In Jean’s life,
too, there was a secret: a lost love which had left her sick at heart. For a
time, things seemed as hopeless as they were frightening—until, one day, an
exciting stranger appeared at Webb House. And Jean once again knew the brightness
and warmth of love.
GRADE: D
BEST QUOTES:
“To be needed was important to anyone. But it had become
especially important to her. Because of Michael Blaine.”
REVIEW:
Jean Reese has been working at a hospital in the city when
she gets a call from Dr. Paul Hartford, the kindly old GP in her hometown. He’s
the latest in a string of physicians to care for recluse Leoma Webb, who
tumbled down the stairs at her family mansion and is now confined to a
wheelchair. Leoma used to live a happy life in Chicago, maybe even with a
boyfriend (this point, among many small other mysteries, is never made clear to
us), but she was called home by her father when her mother died a year ago, and
then the unfortunate accident kept her there. Now Leoma lives with her father,
Nathaniel; her evil cousin Quentin, who torments everyone in the house yet is
allowed to continue living there; and Chad, Leoma’s “youngest” brother, who is
about 20 years younger than she is. (If there’s another brother, we never hear
about him, for which we can probably be grateful.) It’s a nutty cast of
characters: Chad wanders the estate grounds tootling on a flute, and Leoma is a
neurotic who, we are repeatedly told, is minutes from collapsing into mental
illness, up multiple times during the night despite repeated doses of sleeping
pills—this woman manages to shake off enough barbiturates to kill a horse.
Jean has taken this job, though she’s heard stories since
childhood about the spooky Webb mansion and the weirdoes who live there,
because her old beau, Michael Blaine, still lives in town. She broke up with
him a year ago because he refused to get serious (read: pop the question), and
she’s been pining for him ever since. It’s hard to understand why, though,
because he’s an arrogant, self-centered ass. He’s working on a deal to buy the
Webb estate and sell it to a group of developers, but Nathaniel Webb is so
difficult to get a meeting with, how will he ever get his foot in the door? Then
the gas station attendant clues him in that his old girlfriend is working at the
house, so he calls up Jean to ask her out. But when Nathaniel refuses to allow
any visitors inside the gates, Michael tells Jean he will not go out with her
unless he can pick her up at the front door “like any civilized man would do”—never
mind that a civilized man doesn’t use his old girlfriend to pull off a business
deal.
The irritating part is that Jean, the dope, falls for it,
and tells Nathaniel that she’ll quit her job if Michael isn’t allowed to come
to the house. Nathaniel, of course, acquiesces, but Michael isn’t satisfied
with just getting inside the house—now he’s pushing Jean to get him a meeting
with Nathaniel, and she still doesn’t get it. “If she refused him, he would be
angry and she didn’t want that,” so off she trots, but this time Nathaniel puts
his foot down. For the rest of their date, Michael is cold and distant, but he
couldn’t be using her, no, “she wouldn’t
think that!”
Then Dr. Hartford is abruptly fired from Leoma’s case for
suggesting to Nathaniel that Leoma needs to be institutionalized for
round-the-clock psychiatric care, and Dr. David Williams enters the scene. He’s
not one to be impetuous, “except for right now, this moment—” and he’s kissing
Jean. “Could a man fall in love with a girl he had seen only a few times? He laughed
at himself. The answer was so obvious. Yes, he could. Because he had!” Ugh.
Meanwhile, Leoma is becoming increasingly unhinged, spending
most of her time crying and moaning, while Chad spends his days diving in the nearby
pond, searching for some evidence that Nathaniel killed his wife; could this be
what Quentin is blackmailing Nathaniel with?
As if this “mystery” isn’t
enough, the book desperately wants to be a gothic tale, with references on
virtually every other page about how “eerie” and “oppressive” “that evil place”
is, “a giant black spider” with “a shadow over it,” “crouching there on the
lake’s edge like a huge brown animal ready to pounce,” where “hate lurked in
every corner.” Jean “felt chilled to the bone after a few days in the Webb
house”; “she was beginning to feel like a prisoner in some kind of a bewitched
house.” OK, OK, we’re all really scared now! But no, we’re not getting off that
easy, we’re going to have to overdose on fear as well: “her bright eyes were
frightened,” “her eyes still filled with terror,” “she couldn’t find any basis
for the kind of fear she felt. It was a cold little gnawing inside. A little
shiver along her nerves.” I guess the reason you have to be beaten over the
head with all this tedious description is because otherwise, you wouldn’t see
it at all. But would that have been a bad thing? If nothing else, it would have
made for a shorter book.
The author must have been a fan of DARK SHADOWS. The name "Quentin" suggests that to me, at least.
ReplyDeleteI have to admit it sounds like something I would read! :)
Either that or "The Sound and the Fury" by William Faulkner.
ReplyDelete