Customer Reviews

Stormcrow Castle

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I was surprised to see what looked like an old-fashioned Gothic Romance on the shelves--and copyrighted 2007! Was this an attempt to revive the sub-genre? Were Gothics coming back into fashion? Was this some cool new twist on a Gothic Romance for the new millennium?

Well, if this is meant to revive the genre, I don't see how it can. It seems like an exercise for the author to write a bare-bones, Gothic Romance that will have all the classic elements with no deviations. And it succeeds at that.

Helena Carlisle is coming to Stormcrow Castle to visit her aunt who is Housekeeper there. She's picked up in the middle of a dark, brooding moor by Lord Torkrow, her aunt's employer, who mistakenly thinks she's the new Housekeeper sent by an agency. Helena is silent as she learns that her aunt has left suddenly to nurse a sick sister. She knows that she is her aunt's only relation and there is no sister, so she takes on the role of the Housekeeper in order to find out what happened to her aunt. The Castle is situated in the middle of forbidding moors, isolated and empty of all but a few servants (the maids having left because they heard strange noices), there are locked attics and hidden rooms and a mysterious female servant who seems to have no clear position in the household. And there's a family curse.

This could almost be a parody of a stereotypical gothic, only it isn't. It just plays it straight and simple. The writing is competent but lack-luster. The characters are sympathetic but woefully two-dimensional. The plot is barely there. There is some little action/climactic scene towards the end, thrown in probably because the formula calls for it, and that's it. Nothing horrible, but nothing at all special, either.

If a straight-forward, no-frills, stereotypic Gothic is something you're looking for, then this is your book! If you're looking for an outstanding Gothic, then look elsewhere (probably any used bookstore carrying older romances from the '60s or '70s will have some that will be more worth your while... Victoria Holt and Phyllis Whitney and others have written some "classic" ones).