The Serpents Skin by Erina Reddan

Pantera Press, $29.99 pb, 364 pp

In Erina Reddan’s The Serpent’s Skin, it is the father and his godlike authority from whom the fracture emanates. The novel begins in 1968, when ten-year-old Elizabeth Jane ‘JJ’ MacBride is living on her parents’ farm in a rural Catholic community. JJ is a perverse child, we’re told; at times, she is possessed by a destructive impulse she calls ‘the red’, which pushes her to call her mother names, defy her older siblings, and lash out at the Mother Superior at her school. 

When the novel opens, JJ’s mother has vanished. She has gone to stay with her sister in Melbourne, JJ’s father claims, but her children cannot contact her and he refuses to say when she’ll be back. Days pass with no word of her return, and JJ starts to sense cracks in her father’s story: why, for instance, would her mother leave behind her wedding ring, or the scarf she wears to Mass each Sunday? But the intricacies of marital relations are beyond JJ’s comprehension, and Reddan is to be commended here for how well she captures the scruffy edges of the juvenile consciousness. JJ may smell the ‘spit of guilt’ on her father, but she’s at a loss as to what it might mean, and her upbringing has taught her that his word, however corrupt, is law.

We then jump forward fourteen years, when a funeral brings JJ together with her family once more and dredges up some long-suppressed memories of her mother’s disappearance. Sadly, this second half of the novel is weaker than the first: we’re told that the adult JJ has become an academic over-achiever and a rising legal star, but there’s little evidence of this in her narration, where her vocabulary and emotional intelligence seem only marginally more sophisticated than when she was a child. Her rebellious spirit makes a welcome resurgence, as she sets out on a second attempt to expose her family’s skeletons, but the plot suffers from an over-specificity of detail. Scenes that should feel tight and suspenseful are forced to a crawl as JJ mechanically informs us every time anyone opens a door, pulls up a chair, or turns on an appliance. This literal-mindedness makes sense in a child’s narration; less so in that of a whip-smart twenty-four-year-old. JJ’s sleuthing pays off eventually, but it’s just a pity the pacing does her characterisation such an injustice.

Other Peoples Houses by Kelli Hawkins

HarperCollins, $32.99 pb, 330 pp

Whereas Reddan’s novel capitalises on the kinds of horrors that eventuate when patriarchy and religion collide, Kelli Hawkins’s Other People’s Houses takes us into the uncanny valley that is upper-middle-class suburbia. Her protagonist, Kate Webb, is a woman suffering from the resilience of grief, a condition that can linger long after the wells of sympathy have dried up. Seeking a sense of intimacy that demands nothing of her in return, Kate spends her time wandering through the manicured interiors of houses that are up for auction, suspending herself in the lives of others as she tries to forget her own.

One house in particular arrests her imagination for reasons that have nothing to do with its pristine façade: the child in the family’s photographs is a doppelgänger for the son she lost ten years prior. When Kate stumbles across signs of dysfunction in the house’s outwardly perfect ménage, her behaviour accelerates from hobbyist prying to outright stalking. As she resolves to protect the child (now a teenager) from a family she believes to be on the point of disintegration, others try to caution her that she is playing with fire. But the alienated and depressed Kate is unreceptive to their warnings, realising, all too late, that the danger is not where she thinks it is.

At first, Kate is a delightfully spiteful narrator: to her vindictive eye, a flag on a windless day is ‘flaccid’; a child wearing a puffy coat looks like ‘a colourful little sausage’. Here, she describes a sycophantic realtor sucking up to a wealthy Sydneysider: ‘She made London sound like heaven. Or an orgasm.’ Other People’s Houses may best be classified as a domestic thriller, but there’s a redemption arc here. We learn through a series of flashbacks that Kate has good reason to be mistrustful of others, and the novel proves to be just as much about her learning to live productively with her grief, and to uncover what kind of person she is when freed of her rage and self-loathing.

As it turns out, that person is a little bland. It’s true what Tolstoy says about happy families; by the novel’s end, all of the well-adjusted characters seem rather alike. Still, the plotting is sound, the twist is solid, and it’s an excellent premise that speaks to the voyeur in all of us. For what other reason does anyone read fiction if not to peer into other people’s houses?

Sargasso by Kathy George

HQ Fiction, $29.99 pb, 392 pp

If in Reddan’s novel the tension crystallises around the father, and in Hawkins’s novel, around the lost child, Kathy George’s Sargasso completes our triptych by focusing on the woman and the house that holds her captive. The title gestures towards George’s literary influences (Charlotte Brontë, Daphne du Maurier, and Jean Rhys), but the novel also draws upon – and subverts – elements of the Gothic hetero-romantic fantasy as outlined by Joanna Russ in her essay, ‘Someone’s Trying to Kill Me and I Think It’s My Husband’ (1973). As Russ explains, part of the draw of the contemporary Gothic romance is the thrill of not knowing whether that brooding, handsome man is the love of one’s life or a homicidal maniac.

The novel’s protagonist, Hannah Prendergast, is a woman returning to her childhood home on the Victorian coast after some years away, having recently inherited her father’s house through her grandmother. Her intention, when she arrives, is to prepare ‘Sargasso’ for sale, but the longer she stays there the more she struggles with the idea of leaving. Her relationship with her boyfriend is threatened by the reappearance of an old childhood friend, Flint: a quintessential Byronic hero, Flint exhibits shades of Heathcliff as well as Sylvia Plath’s ‘man in black with a Meinkampf look’.

Through flashbacks, we learn more about the untimely death of Hannah’s father, a brilliant architect who designed Sargasso, but we also encounter more questions than answers about Flint. In the present day, the adult Hannah is falling more and more under his spell – or, perhaps, like any good Gothic heroine, it’s the house that seems to bring him to her that she loves first and foremost.

To reinvent a wheel that has already completed many a rotation is not an easy task, and in one sense there’s nothing hugely innovative about Sargasso. As with its predecessors, there’s a skulking presence lurking in its figurative attic, and readers familiar with the genre might well see the twists coming long before the end. But it’s so beautifully written, so skilfully plotted, such a masterpiece of tension and atmosphere, that it hardly matters. There’s a reason so many of us keep coming back to the Gothic, despite knowing all its tropes inside and out: like Hannah, Jane Eyre, and Mrs de Winter before her, we return to these houses of unreason in our dreams.