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3.5/5

I may sink this rating down a star further on out, but in light of today's bout of reading leaving me rather pleased, I'd rather hold on to what remaining good will I have for the moment. For this is yet another work hailing from a severely underread author, one who smacks far more of Poe and the gothic than of Alcott and the domestic, but due to a bout of rather desperate socioeconomic forces, submitted her writing prowess to first capitalism and then religion. A tale frequently told during certain areas of the world during certain centuries, I imagine, but I must admit, Spofford bears up better than most examples I've come across, if sometimes merely in terms of a single singularity rather than an overarching quality. For if the Poe didn't tip you off, this author delights in unloading a sea of syntax and a Mariana's Trench of dictionary terms at every point, and of the ten tales represented here, more than half risk completely losing themselves to overly indulgent, and thus borderline nonsensical, froth. And yet, give Spofford a structure, as is the case with "Old Madame" and a certain family history of several centuries prior, and narratological purpose weds to evocative prose so splendidly and so profoundly that one wishes it had been a novel in its own right. So, certainly not to everyone's tastes, but for those who don't mind sinking (although in an admittedly hit or miss fashion) for a time into the writing of someone who, were circumstances different, could may have well been an early crafter of horror or science fiction in her own right, this is rather a rare treat.

As I said, this collection is rather hit or miss. The introduction rhapsodizes about "In a Cellar" and "The Amber Gods" and gives "Circumstance" and "In the Maguerriwock" their due, but I personally found the tales' respective mixes of non-watertight mysteries and blowsy dramas compounded by not too small a measure of white othering too filmy to leave a lasting impression. "The Black Bess," and "Her Story" both heavily rely on the hazy voluptuousness that literature loves to use as demarcation between sanity and madness, and I much preferred it to when the writing fully committed to its traversal of the unknown, whether unexplored continent as in "The Moonstone Mass" or supernatural hauntings in the case of "The Godmothers," for at least there's some tangible death that a reader can sink one's teeth into. In comparison to the rest of the collection, "Miss Susan's Love Affair" is almost entirely straightforward and thus suffers heavily for it, leaving "Old Madame," the second of the last of the collection, to wear the crown in my personal estimation. Bombastic a claim as this is, that particular piece reminded me of nothing so much as Wuthering Heights with its socially strangled romances and hellishly damned family lines, albeit showing far more clearly the historical bones infusing the story's flesh in a way that I, indulger in well written nonfiction that I am, found deliciously compelling. Certainly not one of the florid thrusts that Spofford composed whilst she was still Prescott, but the older I grow, the more I recognize the value of tempering when it comes to writing in a way that hedges one's strengths and bears up one's weaknesses (although I could do without the selfish holier-than-thou conservatism so many readers seem to confuse that with). It's not enough to make me go track down everything else that's survived of the writer's work (indeed, there doesn't seem to be much beyond this selection of stories), but it does make me think about potentials, especially if a writer of today were to take on the tale in as richly infused a manner as it deserved without attempting to stuff an 800 page work into 400 printed sheets. Certainly not a thought I expected to be dwelling upon at the close of this collection, and sufficient for me to give the entirety a higher rating, leastwise for now.

I suppose, considering everything I've said previously in this review, that it would be fair to classify this as a "hidden gem." The phrase is a bit too uncritically positive for my liking, especially in a case of writing where the quibbles are plain to see, but when Spofford does something well, she does it very, very well, to the point that, from thereon out, I'll have a hard time taking seriously anyone who proclaims themselves to be some sort of disinterrer of the unfairly buried in the halls of literature but doesn't have some awareness of her work. It certainly has me craving well written pieces of a more than eerie quality that doesn't devolve as lazily into jump scares, eugenics, or general bigotry as so much tends to do these days, but when my choices seem to be confined to Lovecraft and his myriad gutless offspring, I can barely even muster the strength necessary to even begin the search. That sort of inured despondency may be why Spofford did so well in my estimation on an instinctual level, if less so on a critical one, and in this particular case, I'll take what I can get. The author may prove less enticing and more soporific to most, but there really isn't any quite like her, and in these days of endless derivatives, it's always good to engage with writing that did its own thing for better or worse.