A little known fact (at least, it was little known to me up until recently): Joyce Carol Oates done lost her mind in the 80′s.
I stumbled across this fact whilst gaily tromping around Amazon looking at stuff one day. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that my dear Jay-CO had written a romance. A Bloodsmoor Romance, to be precise. I had to own it. Because what could be cooler than combining my favorite high-fallootin’ lit author with my seedy love for cheap beach fiction?
Alas, I discovered soon upon the delivery of said tome that, of course, Jay-CO would not write a pile of cheap beach fiction. Instead, she has pulled together some seven hundred pages of a Gothic romance novel. For those of you not acquainted with the vagaries of this term, Gothic romances and modern romances are vastly different. Gothic romances oft feature a lovely heroine swooning about a drafty old mansion, bemoaning stuff left and right, with a narrative style that’s like Dickens humped a thesaurus, full of run-ons, bizarre exercises in vocabulary and odd comma splices. (The affect of said narrative style can be seen here, on this blog post, for it is highly impossible for me to write in any brief, grammatically correct or serious fashion whilst reading such a winding, ornate sequence of words. And there’s lost of whilsts, too.) Whilst there’s still bemoaning in modern romances, the narrative style is, shall we say, far less overwrought. It’s like comparing a long, chaste courtship to a quick blow job.
Jay-CO’s captured the Gothic romance style of writing perfectly, of course; if someone weren’t paying attention to the copyright date, they might think the book was written at the turn of the century. Plus, she uses the opportunity to make scathing societal commentary on the rights of women, the nature of intelligence, and other lofty stuff about the human condition. It’s all very academic, and finely executed, but that also means that the book is freakin’ unreadable. Only the most hardcore English geeks can get all the way through this book and enjoy it.
Sadly, I am only a slightly hardcore English geek.
Doubly sadly because, in my haste, I decided I must have not only A Bloodsmoor Romance, but the prequel and sequel, Bellefleur and Mysteries of Winterthurn. Alas, my hapless husband bought them all for me as an early birthday gift. Now I have to read them, all eighteen hundred some-odd pages, and I fear that, by the time I finish, I shall be mad.
Yes, quite mad, in fact. Quite.
Crossposted from my other blog, Typeworm, which is a bit more civilized.
I’m trying to read through some classics to as a new education for myself. It has been a goal of mine for more than a year. I’ve had to find time to read both the authors I love now and what I like from the past. It can be a challenge.
But it is such a release to realise that one is quite, quite mad.