Review: All is not well in Paradise
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 01 21, 2013
Colton Manor by Francene Carroll has all the trappings of a Gothic story: the spooky haunted house with a tragic past, the open-minded, sensitive heroine, the condescending, skeptical hero who channels the ghosts of the past, and a pact with the devil in exchange for untold riches.Before you reach the story, you're treated with a quote from Shakespeare: "Love is the greatest of dreams, yet the worst of nightmares," so the stage is set for a love story that will go awry. Gothic imagery opens the novella in the prologue - an imposing mansion set on the edge of a cliff in Paradise, New South Wales, Australia, with the ocean as backdrop and a gloomy, rainy atmosphere. The time is the late 1800s with Anna, newly married, and her husband, Edward (very 19th century hero) are settled into Colton Manor which has turned her once loving husband into a cruel and sadistic shell of his former self. Factor in emotional and physical abuse, and you've got a Bluebeard-type of situation to experience.Chapter One opens in present day with Ursula St. Clair as the modern-day heroine renting Colton Manor for the summer. There is plenty of foreshadowing that builds in intensity as the narrative progresses. Enter Damien Knight as the skeptical hero who agrees to share the mansion with Ursula so she won't have to endure its spookiness by herself. I don't want to give away too much of the story so I'll leave you to experience it for yourself.There is nothing about this novella that is ground-breaking; it is pure old-school Gothic using many standard Gothic tropes. You won't find any blood and guts and that is part of what I found charming. A slight twist appears which I won't give away, and while it didn't shake things up too much, I found it was done effectively and with thought.I have a background in Gothic fiction and with having reading so much of it, I can't say I found any of it overly spooky, but the storyline is handled in classic Gothic fashion; it is well-written, and certainly worth the read.