Horror, Romance, and the Wrong Kind of Love

H.D. Carlton, Haunting Adeline: Cat & Mouse Duet, Book 1

Adeline Reilly has just inherited her grandmother's old house, a Victorian-style manor knockoff overlooking the Washington coast. The house might be cursed; Addie certainly thinks it resembles a horror movie set, but that doesn’t discourage her from moving in and updating the interior. But somebody else has noticed Addie’s arrival. A nameless hacker, vigilante, and apparent superhuman begins stalking her, entering her house silently and with apparent impunity.

I became interested in this novel because author H.D. Carlton became a runaway bestseller without backing from a Big-Five publisher. Maybe, I thought, she tapped some unrecognized reservoir of readership the algorithm-driven mainstreamers ignored. Having read this one, I suspect that her magic must be her willingness to air Freudian linen, because I don’t recall a more bog-standard psychological tapestry recently outside an undergraduate psych textbook.

Like Carlton, Addie is an independent novelist, and therefore has remarkable time liberty. She apparently has freedom to supervise the professional restoration of Parsons Manor, while also having lunch dates with her best friend, and live author appearances. Despite her freedom, though, she has no ability to supervise her house, so her stalker has an unimpeded ability to enter, leave flowers and letters, raid her liquor cabinet, and escape unseen.

And what a stalker. He has time enough to haunt Addie’s romantic life, including torturing and humiliating her dates. But he moonlights as a vigilante, hunting a national human trafficking network. This secondary plot is tonally inconsistent with the Gothic main plot, resembling an unsold Hollywood treatment. He’s also able to follow Addie from the city to her isolated country house, commit crimes, and destroy the evidence, remaining constantly invisible.

Adeline’s support network apparently consists of two people: her mother and her best friend. Daya, her best friend, has one role: try to get Addie laid. That’s her response to everything. Excessively ambitious house restoration project? Let’s get drunk and laid. Stalker somehow entering Addie’s locked house and leaving tokens? Let’s get drunk and laid. Describing Daya as Adeline’s Freudian id is, frankly, generous.

Her mother, therefore, is her Freudian superego. She exists to warn Addie against anything risky, chaotic, or fun. She appears when necessary to provide dire, sepulchral exposition, and to urge Addie to assume more socially acceptable adult responsibilities. At one key juncture, she drives an hour to give Addie a warning she could’ve conveyed in a text message, because fundamentally, she isn’t a rounded person, she’s a narrative device.

H.D. Carlton

If we understand Addie’s supporting cast in Freudian terms, then her nameless stalker represents both Eros and Thanos. He selects Addie entirely because she’s beautiful, which he expounds in lush detail. But, without speaking to her (or reading her prose) he declares himself “addicted” to her. Then he proclaims: “All I want is to break her. Shatter her into pieces. And then arrange those pieces to fit against my own.”

Yikes.

Carlton manipulates the story to ensure that Addie’s stalker remains, for narrative purposes, blameless. Sure, he’s a violent torturer, but it’s okay, because the people he hurts are QAnon-style human traffickers. Sure, he captures and murders any man Addie attempts to hook up with, but it’s okay, because she brings home abusers and criminals who deserve being hurt. Violence winds up being protective, nurturing, even benevolent. Brutality as romantic desire.

Okay, this character is an unrefined fantasy of male domination. Some women find violence the ultimate expression of masculinity; I’m reminded of the women who sent Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker, love letters during his decades of incarceration. I can only imagine the women who entertain these fantasies haven’t survived an abusive relationship, because this character isn’t sexy, nor even particularly frightening; he’s just disgusting.

Yet Addie romanticizes him, finding parallels with her great-grandmother’s juicy personal diaries. Like Addie, Genevieve Parsons had an enigmatic admirer who haunted the margins of her forested Gothic gingerbread house. We await how these two stories will converge. But until they do, Addie increasingly sees her violent stalker as a dangerous boyfriend like her great-nana’s dangerous, shadowy love. She sees both as frightening and titillating.

Takes all kinds, I guess.

This glorification of violence, as an expression of love, frightens me. Not in the good frightening way that draws audiences back to horror literature and novels, I understand that. Rather, this novel elevates violence as romantic desire, repeating the myth that, if he loves you, he’ll hurt any rivals and dominate your time. I suppose this might seem erotic and exciting, if you haven’t been through it.

Teenage Torture and Softcore Self-Indulgence

Harleigh Beck, Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are: an Erotic Horror Story

It’s been nearly a year since Skyler and Evelyn killed their high school’s star quarterback, Nate, in a totally avoidable hit-and-run accident. They’ve kept their culpability secret for an entire year, despite the rumor-mongering common in small towns. But as the anniversary approaches, Skyler begins seeing Nate everywhere. She fears his spirit hungers for revenge, until he astounds her by showing up, alive and unmarked, in the high school hallway.

To review this novel, I must first acknowledge: I’m not Harleigh Beck’s intended audience. Before page one, Beck dedicates this novel “For all of my erotic horror girlies.” Not women, girlies. Beck has selected a mostly young, primarily female audience, presumably one whose ability to appreciate literature is uncluttered by excessive prior reading. Perhaps that’s why Beck pinches liberally from Tobe Hooper, Ambrose Bierce, Kevin Williamson, and more.

The seemingly resurrected Nate wants revenge on Skyler specifically. And the revenge he wants is specifically sexual in nature. Though Skyler, who narrates most of this novel in first person, repeatedly emphasizes her plainness and lack of desirability, she has constant attention from several boys—a staple of young adult fiction. But while Dustin and Max want to date Skyler, Nate wants to humiliate, degrade, and dominate her.

And Skyler loves it.

Although these characters are high school students, and several important scenes happen inside their school, Skyler and Nate occupy a world substantially devoid of adults, surnames, and other indicators. Only in the epilogue do any adults (besides Skyler’s mostly absent, milquetoast dad) appear, or any characters receive surnames. Group dynamics mimic teen movies from the 1990s and 2000s. Characters, individually or together, are beholden to Hollywood boilerplates.

Only in Nate’s tortures of Skyler do events vary from cinematic standards. By day, Nate finds ways to isolate and gaslight Skyler. By night, he seeks increasingly embarrassing ways to sexually torment her, promising to eventually deflower and assassinate her. His conflation of sex and death would trigger Sigmund Freud’s alarm bells, not only for his dominant power trip, but also the increasing gratification Skyler feels at her forced submission.

Beck divides the novel into two parts. (Three actually, but the third is a brief codicil.) Part One mimics conventional teen horror. Nate tortures Skyler in broad daylight, blackmailing her into complicity by threatening to reveal what happened that fateful night. Nate’s malevolent predations exist amid a context of teenage ennui: high school, where everybody fits pre-written social roles, and Skyler’s home life, where Dad has become a phantom.

Harleigh Beck

Part Two occurs in a single frenetic night. Teenagers gather at an abandoned vacation cabin for a Halloween party, where Nate decides to finally enact his revenge. Somehow, while Nate cleaves a body count, Agatha Christie style, through the amassed teens, nobody pauses the party. The atmosphere of adolescent banality that permeates Part One becomes oppressive in Part Two, as Skyler increasingly realizes why she’s trapped inside with her tormentor.

Previous reviewers have raved about Beck’s “twist ending,” which has become an obligatory component of genre fiction today. This further demonstrates that Beck writes for an audience unclouded by excessive genre familiarity, because without spoilers, she signposts the twist from around page 20. Besides, it’ll take serious gumption to write twists exceeding Catriona Ward, so maybe authors should pause that boilerplate for now.

And the erotic component? Beck highlights that component in her promotional material, and considers herself so transgressive that she requires a full-page trigger warning in the front matter. So does the content stir my loins? No, but I’m not seventeen, like these characters. They seemingly find eros in describing body parts and saying dirty words. They’re clearly finding their sexuality, and as students, reduce the experience to limbs and anatomy.

I find myself neither frightened, nor aroused, nor invested in character development, as characters develop according to their designated Hollywood roles. But again, I’m not Beck’s preferred audience: I’m a middle-aged male who’s watched horror movies for thirty years. Beck writes for a more naive audience unjaded by either sex or death. Perhaps it matters that Skyler repeatedly protests her Laurie Strode-like innocence.

Perhaps Beck would rather write big-ticket film treatments. Perhaps this story might make stirring, acceptably dangerous late-night Netflix viewing. But just reading it, where I set my own pace, I’m too conscious of Beck’s cinematic sources and shopworn cliches. Beck has an earnest, skillful voice and handles English well, so I finished the novel easily. But without either eros or thanos, I close the book and think: “Meh.”