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by Clare B. Dunkle
Pub. Date: September 2010
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Format: Hardback, 160pp
Age Range: Young Adult
Series: None
ISBN-13: 9780805091168
Synopsis from Barnes & Noble
Young Tabby Aykroyd has been brought to the dusty mansion of Seldom House to be nursemaid to a foundling boy. He is a savage little creature, but the Yorkshire moors harbor far worse, as Tabby soon discovers. Why do scores of dead maids and masters haunt Seldom House with a jealous devotion that extends beyond the grave?
As Tabby struggles to escape the evil forces rising out of the land, she watches her young charge choose a different path. Long before he reaches the old farmhouse of Wuthering Heights, the boy who will become Heathcliff has doomed himself and any who try to befriend him.
Jennifer's Review of The House of Dead Maids
(This review contains spoilers.)
It would have been wonderful to have read, reviewed, and rated Clare Dunkle’s little book minus its blurb and final chapter. I would have bestowed five stars upon it without hesitation. From the front cover to the inner illustrations to the penultimate chapter, The House of Dead Maids is an excellent ghost story. Why only three stars then? I’ll get to that. But first, the art.
Few horror novels, or novellas, as this is, are blessed with such an evocative cover – with her black, empty eye sockets, the dead maid’s face, set amongst stark, bare tree branches with an otherworldly light glowing in the background, creates a forbidding atmosphere that augurs suspense, mystery, and menacing ghosts. Add to that the creepy illustrations that head each chapter and the artwork earns five big stars. (Give credit for the illustrations to Patrick Arrasmith. Among other things, he is responsible for the equally outstanding, and spooky, art of The Last Apprentice series.)
The promise of the cover is, for the first eleven chapters, fulfilled and then some. The story contains numerous beautifully written, chilling passages that are a pleasure to read:
The dead hold no terrors for me. I have watched by the beds of those who have passed on, comforted by their sorrowless repose. But this little maid was a ghastly thing, all the more horrible because she stood before me. It wasn’t the pallid hue of her grimy face that shocked me, or her little gray hands and feet. It was the holes where her eyes should have been, great round sockets of shadow.
As a result of her consistently able writing, Dunkle’s characters and setting come to life in all their unsettling glory. Aside from Tabby, the young nursemaid and our heroine, no one creates sympathy in the reader. But this is as it should be, for Tabby is an innocent thrown in among wolves. The nameless six year old boy who becomes Tabby’s charge (“Himself”, she dubs him, though he prefers, and revels in, “heathen git”) is a tyrant and a cruel little monster. When we find out that he and Tabby are doomed to die, the only reason we hope that Tabby will be able to rescue Himself is because we know she won’t leave without him. Otherwise, we would be as happy to see him die as he would be. (Himself longs to come back as a ghost and terrorize the household where he and Tabby are held prisoner.) The bulk of the cast consists of cold, amoral individuals – not unlike the horde of ghosts that haunt the house. Together, the living and the dead create a sinister environment where, if evil rests, it’s only to lie down in bed with you. (Literally, as Tabby finds out.)
Other reviewers have summarized the plot. I will only say that the resolution arrives naturally and is suspenseful and exciting. And that it is with much satisfaction that we read this, the perfect closing line:
Thus we came safe out of that accursed country, with not a footprint left behind to tell of our passing, nor a scent for the bloodhound to catch.
As if they were ghosts, the admiring reader thinks.
But alas! Despite how neatly that sentence concludes the story, the book refuses to end. Instead, it staggers on through an entirely unnecessary chapter twelve – a contrived piece of work with little of the atmosphere of the preceding chapters, which spoils the novella by cheapening all that comes before it. And now I must refer to that other part of the book I had wished gone – the blurb on the back cover. There we are told that The House of Dead Maids is a prequel to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, and that “the child who will become Heathcliff is already a savage little creature”, etc. But this story – and by that I mean the eleven chapter tale of Tabby and Himself – is most assuredly not a prequel to Wuthering Heights. (Watching Heathcliff being tugged through an adventure at six years old hardly constitutes a prequel. The intent, apparently, is that this story lays the groundwork for the brooding adult Heathcliff – but one might consider boyhood and adolescence to be of equal or greater importance to his development, especially as later on we are led to believe that those years will be normal and pleasant ones.)
What makes the book a prequel is that infernal chapter twelve, in which the reader is bombarded with well over a decade’s worth of information about Tabby’s later life: She makes a friend and together they open a knitting school; she has two more encounters with ghosts; she survives a serious illness; her friend marries and she moves in with the couple; finally, she becomes a maid for the Brontë family and tells the children all manner of eerie stories. Also on this excursion into biography, we find out that Himself was picked up on the street by a kindly, respectable stranger who, when he asks the “little scoundrel” his name, mistakes his reply, “heathen git”, for “Heathcliff”. (Thanks to the blabbing blurb, the reader sees that coming from the first time “heathen git” is used in the story.) As Heathcliff is coincidentally the name of the stranger’s dead son, he immediately announces that he will take the rude, unkempt, thieving lad home to live with him (as his son, it is implied) at Wuthering Heights.
A writer needs to know where to end his/her book. It seems basic and obvious, but it is as much a skill as knowing where a story should begin. In her epilogue, Dunkle says she was inspired to write Dead Maids by Wuthering Heights and the real life Tabby. But in that final chapter, she forces her book to be something it doesn’t want or have to be, thereby dragging it down. Now, instead of a smile appearing on the reader’s face as she closes the book, there’s a grimace.
A ghost story is simply a type of fairy tale. And like a fairy tale, it occupies a small, confined world from which the reader should be released as soon as the plot has been resolved. We don’t need to see what happens after “happily ever after” – that broadens the world and spreads thin the spell the story has cast upon us, ruining the moment, as it were. Give the boy a name, reduce the number of times he’s called a “heathen git”, and end the book at chapter eleven. The House of Dead Maids would then stand on its own as a minor classic in the field of young adult horror. As it is, it will be forever huddling, ghost-like, in the shadows of Wuthering Heights. Although, as a huge fan of that novel, perhaps that is exactly what Dunkle intended. It would explain why that unfortunate final chapter was tacked on to an otherwise enjoyable and memorable ghost story.
(Two minor comments:
1. On several occasions, Tabby uses the word “wisht” – an adjective which is British dialectal for “dismal” or “eerie” – to tell Himself to be quiet. Doubtless, the author meant to write the interjection “whist” (or “whisht”), meaning “hush”. But mine being an ARC, hopefully such mistakes were caught and corrected.
2. I can’t let this review go by without quoting the second sentence from the book’s Dedication: “I love you, Jennifer.” Sure, the comment’s not meant for me, but reading that line after having just turned over the unnerving cover with those empty sockets staring at me curled my toes!)
(Review originally published October 22, 2010, on GoodReads.com.)
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