The New Snowy Gothic

Wendy Webb, The Stroke of Winter: A Novel

Amethyst “Tess” Bell spent summers growing up in bucolic Wharton, overlooking Lake Superior, but this is her first winter in the tourist town. She’s just inherited her grandparents’ ornate mansion, beautiful but too huge for one divorced empty-nester. The house is part of Wharton’s legend, where her eccentric grandfather, Sebastian Bell, created the oil paintings that made him, and Wharton, famous. Tess wants to renovate, which means unlocking parts of the building sealed for decades.

Wendy Webb’s eighth novel continues themes introduced in Webb’s previous works: massive mansions, family secrets, and semirural settings overlooking Lake Superior. Webb is conscious of herself writing in the Gothic tradition, and revives storytelling elements previously pioneered by Horace Walpole and the Brontë sisters. This means her plot outline won’t much surprise seasoned readers, focusing on dark family secrets, surprise twists, and houses bigger on the inside. But surprise isn’t Webb’s point, it’s the journey.

Tess’s grandiose plans to renovate the family mansion probably exceed her skills. Especially when a winter snowstorm socks Wharton in, forcing her to shelter with a stray white dog, a massive Malamute that appoints itself her protector. Trapped inside, she’s awakened nightly by strange shadows and unexplained sounds coming from behind a door her grandmother nailed shut decades earlier, after her grandfather passed. Has vermin gotten into the house? Or is it something far worse?

Webb’s storytelling requires some willing suspension of disbelief. Consider first Tess’s astonishment that winters on Lake Superior are harsh, despite knowing the town mostly empties every October. I spent a couple of childhood years on the UP, overlooking “the big lake they call Gitchee Gumee,” so I knew about bitter winds and Lake Effect snow. Seems that Tess, like Heathcliffe and Catherine, should’ve simply anticipated violent weather and isolation as the background of her tale.

Laying that and similar quibbles aside, Webb does a remarkable job creating atmospherics. Tess spends December discovering the intricate structure of the house and town she only previously knew as a seasonal visitor. Wharton definitely has its romantic side, and Webb describes its downtown in pastoral terms familiar from countless Hallmark Christmas romances. But the more Tess probes the community’s history, the more she discovers secrets buried back before White people settled on Ojibwe land.

Wendy Webb

Tess hires a local handyman to open the mansion’s locked chambers. Wyatt proves well-connected to Wharton’s people and history, and quickly assembles a local crew. But when the long-hidden chambers prove to contain nothing that could’ve created the sounds and shadows keeping Tess awake, Wyatt basically adopts her, making her mission his. Deep within her artist grandfather’s studio, Tess finds evidence potentially worth millions, but which could submarine her family’s artistic and philanthropic legacy forever.

Thus commences a narrative of twists and circumstances, bolstered by seemingly supernatural occurrences. Evidence rearranges itself inside locked rooms. Lights and shadows ignore laws of cause and effect. It’s almost like Tess’s mansion, and eventually the town itself, want Tess and Wyatt to uncover secrets buried before they were born. But evidence emerges only by increments, and our protagonists often operate blind. We know, because we’ve read similar books, that first conclusions are often unreliable.

Webb’s storytelling is definitely plot-driven. Our protagonists coax clues from the usual suspects: the half-dotty grandfather, the police chief, local business owners. This coaxing often means characters must re-explain information they’ve already discovered elsewhere. (I began skimming these scenes.) Meanwhile, Tess and Wyatt fall into a comfy relationship that’s half romantic, half trauma-bonding. They’ve forgotten a secret I discovered returning to my parents’ hometown as an adult: you don’t always know who’s related to you.

This plot-driven approach means Webb’s voice is sometimes wordy. On multiple occasions, Tess, a former executive chef, cooks dinner, a process which Webb describes with the loving detail of a food blogger. Again, I started skimming. This requirement also sometimes strains plausibility: middle-aged divorced men don’t just have goat cheese on hand, especially in semi-rural tourist towns during the off-season. Webb frequently describes a lush, low-friction world she wishes she lived in. Me too, sister.

Briefly, Webb writes for audiences more interested in plot than character. Her protagonists journey into the core of the mansion’s secrets, but aren’t personally introspective. This isn’t necessarily bad: Webb’s intricate narrative isn’t pathbreaking, but it’s fun, and we enjoy following the journey alongside our protagonists. But it does require reading with some selective judgment. Audiences reared on a certain kind of character-driven narrative will have to adjust themselves to Webb’s fast but plot-centric style.