Caitlin Starling's THE DEATH OF JANE LAWRENCE

you tried to live a small life, jane shoringfield lawrence. you tried to have no regrets. you tried to control everything. and now you are here, filled with guilt. how many have died because of your actions? because you married a man who did not want to marry, because you made him care enough to lie to you, because you forced him to confront those lies?

That's a pretty intense bit of dialogue-or-monologue whatever the story it's in, but coming from the mouth of a unique monster in the middle of a gothic novel that seems at first like it's going to be so by-the-books a gothic novel that it needs to have a woman with great hair running away from a building on the cover, it's more intense still, and that's what The Death of Jane Lawrence is from the get-go: intense. 

The novel at first seems like a gothic take on my beloved Middlemarch, and in many ways it is as I'll discuss a bit below, but we quickly learn that it's actually set in another world, in which the Great Britain analogue fought a terrible war on its own soil against a Russia analogue, and many ordinary civilians who took on the job of helping the injured and the trapped when cities were attacked or fell, were killed by chemical weapons. So this argues for it being a post World War I story, but there are no internal combustion engines or electricity; indeed, only the poshest of houses has gas lighting, so the feel is of the 19th more than the 20th century. Also, a kind of magic actually works, maybe. We'll get to that.

Jane Lawrence is our heroine's married name, though she starts off the novel as a PTSD-riddled ward of her late parents' friends, newly adult and faced with a tight situation. Her guardians are moving back to the city where her parents died horribly in the war, which she doesn't want to do, but the income she has from her parents isn't quite enough to live on by herself, so she needs to find a way to supplement that somehow. She is a self-taught accountant of considerable skill, but the alternate England in which she lives isn't quite ready to countenance a single young lady supporting herself that way, yada yada, point is, girl needs to get herself married. But see that bit where she's a self-taught accountant? There's a bit more to it all than that; Jane doesn't really do people, she does numbers. Brilliantly and often, and often to the point of not noticing that she's been doing numbers for ten hours without a break and oh, somebody's been trying to talk to her for the last twenty minutes oops.

Enter Augustine, not exactly the Tertius Lydgate to her Rosamund Vincy, but he is a well-educated and idealistic doctor who could have had a brilliant career elsewhere but is practicing in their quaint little town and living in his family's seriously dilapidated estate, so he is very Lydgate-ish if Jane is no Rosamund*. Lydgate-ishly, too, Augustine is known to be less than a brilliant businessman for all that he's a great surgeon, and so seems perfect for Jane, who doesn't want a husband so much as she wants an employer who can't fire her. Augustine has no wish to get married, but she quickly out-logics him and shows him he's better off with than without her, and quickly the two quickly reach a very businesslike arrangement with some odd conditions: Jane is to live in town in living quarters above Augustine's office, while he goes home every night to the aforementioned estate. She's not to ask why, nor to explore, maybe she'll get to have a peek at the place once in a while someday but never at night, etc. In other words, Augustine Has Secrets.

Circumstances, of course, force them out of their perfectly planned arrangements almost immediately, starting with the fact that oops, they're attracted to each other, rather ferociously. And then, oops, a mix-up on their wedding day teams up with an epic thunderstorm to trap them both overnight on Augustine's dilapidated estate full of secrets, some of which Jane has personal encounters with. Oops, oops, oops!

Chief among these secrets are terrifying reflections in darkened windows and dusty mirrors (dilapidated is actually a kind word to describe the state of Augustine's stately home; it's a barely habitable dump) of a young woman with blood red eyes and terrifying aspect. But Augustine's aspect is not merely that of a man who lives in a haunted house, as Jane quickly discovers; as I said, in this world, it's possible that a kind of magic exists, though it's a far cry from the mediums-and-Ouija-boards the ghostly apparition sets us up to expect; this world's magic owes more to that of Diane Duane's Young Wizards series than to any ordinary fantasy novel. Which means that, yes, Jane's got "a mind for magic" more than most of the other practitioners we encounter in this story, which might all be fine and good except it's via this maybe-magic that the monsters I quoted at the beginning of this entry have found their way into Augustine's house and Jane's life.

The last third of the book is chiefly taken up with Jane's reluctant embrace of her abilities (for very good reasons) and the various emotional, moral and physical costs of her doing so, and this novel does not pull any punches in describing them. She nearly starves, has to confront every fear she's ever felt in vividly rendered detail, and has to do some pretty gross things. This is not a story for sissies, though the 19th century medicine angle should have scared them off already.

But if, say, Sarah Chorn is not cranking out her tear-jerking gutbusters fast enough for you, I'd say you could add some Caitlin Starling to your TBR pile to fill in the gaps between Sarah's books. And if Sarah is new to you and Caitlin is not, well, you know what to do. Go make with the clicky.

Just have some kleenex handy.

*For one thing, she gets roped into helping with a dramatic and bloody emergency case on her very first day at his office, which is only the second day of their acquaintance!