Mysterious Maine #1
Katrina Leno's Horrid
Hi, friends,
So I had a odd one this past weekend: I was stomping around Kennebunk on Saturday, catching Pikmin and listening to podcasts, and I swung in to Mainely Murders to say hi to Ann and Paula, as it had been a while.
None of that is the odd part.
The odd part is that when I got home, I picked up Katrina Leno’s Horrid, and it opened with a scene in which the main character and her mother—who are moving from California to Maine—stop in at a bookstore that specializes in mysteries… that’s run by a woman named Paula. In the book, it’s in Kennebunkport rather than Kennebunk, and it’s in a converted garage rather than a barn, but it seems too close to not be a reference, no? [Edit: Heyyyyy, I was right!]
Anyway, it’s funny when things converge like that.
It was a thick thing, a heavy thing. The feeling of neglect seemed to radiate from all around them. They stood in the doorway, peeking in, letting their eyes adjust to the dim light, and then Ruth stepped inside and Jane followed her and there it was, that phrase again, because walking through the front door felt exactly like returning to the past, in such a quick, immediate way it left her feeling a little dizzy.
—Horrid, by Katrina Leno
After the sudden death of her father, Jane and her mother move from California to her mother’s childhood home in a small town in Maine. Jane and Ruth are both grieving, both still coming to terms with the fact that they’re basically broke, both trying their damnedest to take care of one another, pick up the pieces of their lives, and move forward.
Despite their deep love for one another, both of them have secrets.
For years, Jane has secretly self-soothed her moments of uncontrollable, blinding rage by slowly eating the pages of her most beloved books. When she’s angry, really angry, sometime she loses time—she comes out of it and realizes that she’s done things that she doesn’t remember doing. And after the move, she starts noticing that sometimes she’s losing time even when she’s not angry.
Ruth, meanwhile, remains tight-lipped about her childhood. She deflects Jane’s questions about the house, steers conversations with locals away from certain topics, sends Jane away when a conversation about the past is inescapable.
They aren’t the only ones with secrets: The house has them, too.
No one has lived there for years, but it’s not empty.
I picked this one up for a few reasons—I loved Leno’s Summer of Salt from 2018, I adored the cover art, and it’s a horror story set in Maine. (As you may have gathered from the subject line on this issue, I’m going to be covering some more spooky Maine stories in the near future.)
I didn’t pick it up because it’s a Gothic, because I didn’t know it was a Gothic—that just ended up being a bonus. But Gothic it is, with an atmospheric, creaky old house, generations of family secrets, push-pull relationships, big emotions that characters try to keep tamped down and hidden, and weirdly beautiful dilapidation and decay.
It’s very much about grief, and the intersection of grief and anger. It’s about other sorts of anger, too—anger that’s immediately expressed in a violent reaction, anger that is bottled-up and quietly simmering, anger that is an undercurrent, a constant state of being. It’s about what happens when we have that sort of anger inside of us, and are trained/taught/forced to hide it, to pretend it doesn’t exist.
It’s about how cultural rules around gender and appropriate behavior result in patterns and cycles of behavior and trauma; about how that trauma, those patterns, just get passed on down through the generations. That in hiding our pain, hiding our trouble, wishing it away into the cornfield, we doom the next generation to recreate and relive it in some form.
“Do you think I made it up?” Jane asked, but what she meant was probably closer to “Did I make it up?” because she honestly had no idea, and having no idea felt even scarier to her than if someone had been in the house. She just wanted to know, one way or the other, and not knowing made her feel weird and untethered and scared.
—Horrid, by Katrina Leno
It’s absolutely a frustrating read—everyone in town, including her mother, so clearly knows something that Jane doesn’t know, but no one talks about it. And crucially, Jane picks up on that vibe, but she doesn’t. ask. And while it’s easy to armchair quarterback about things like that, that sort of judgement isn’t particularly fair or helpful—we’ve all been in situations where we haven’t asked questions because sometimes, questions are really really hard to ask.
And they’re that much harder to ask when you’re only seventeen-ish years old.
How do you even find the words for, “Hey, so was my grandmother kind of a monster? Also, was there a Tragic Child Death in our new home? What’s the deal with these roses, and why are they blooming way out of season, not to mention changing color overnight?” Add to that Jane’s blackout episodes, and it’s entirely understandable that she’d be hesitant to trust her own perception, let alone bring attention to it.
So, yes, a frustrating experience, but one that’s supposed to be frustrating.
Once we get answers, once motivations behind actions are explained and ultimately, the various mysteries are resolved—or, well, revealed—the characters’ choices make sense for them, for their situations and personalities.
It’s a slow burn story, one that builds tension and again, frustration—and ultimately, it pays off. The ending is horrifying and weirdly satisfying, and I’m always here for that.
Random Maine Content: I really appreciated the bit about Mainers’ tendency to have, like, 97 coats on hand at any given time. There is literally one closet in our house, and it is packed to the gills with coats, mostly hand-me-downs from friends and family, because a good coat is a good coat, and people are always passing them around. We visited my father recently and he was wearing one of MY old (particularly hideous) high school coats, and when I commented on it, he was like, “Huh. I wondered where this came from. Kinda bright for my taste, but it’s real warm.”
The fear she felt was slowly being replaced with anger. Good, strong, pure anger. It unstuck her limbs and calmed her and filled her with a gentle kind of peace.
—Horrid, by Katrina Leno
More Gothic-y YA
The Changeling
Peter Medak, 1980
Shudder | Amazon | Tubi
Oh, The Changeling. I love it more every time I rewatch it.
Partway through Horrid, there’s a scene in which a marble inexplicably rolls out of a locked room, under the door—a marble that Jane recognizes from Her Past—and it immediately made me think of the red-and-white ball bouncing down the stairs towards George C. Scott in The Changeling. The Changeling is also about grief and a house haunted by a dead child and a cross-country move, but it is ENTIRELY tonally different.
George C. Scott, still reeling from the death of his wife and child, moves from New York to Seattle, and into an old house that hasn’t been occupied in years. Before long, he is like, “Well, shit, this house is clearly haunted.” Which I *love*—so often, haunted house stories are about people who are like, “What, no, there must be some other explanation,” and they grasp at straws for like 2/3s of the runtime when they could be, like, MOVING OUT, and by the time they finally accept what’s happening, it’s too late for them and it’s all very annoying.
ANYWAY, George C. Scott is like, “It’s not the pipes? MUST BE A GHOST. TIME TO GO TO THE LIBRARY!”
It rules. The performances are excellent across the board, the sets are great, there are loads of rad shots. It’s another slow burn, super atmospheric, and for those of you who AREN’T into horror, it might even work for you, because it’s more of a paranormal-mystery-drama than an out-and-out horror story.
I hope your week is going well so far?
Talk soon,
Leila
"The Changeling" was my first horror film. I was a little young for it, and it (unsurprisingly) haunted me. The horrific accident at the beginning, the bouncing ball, the banging pipes, the rock (I think?) that gets thrown at him FROM THE CLOSED-UP, INACCESSIBLE AND UNINHABITED ATTIC WINDOW. I watched it again about 15 years ago...I wonder what I would make of it now.
*Horrid* has made its way to my list, and I will save it for October!
Ooh, love those quotes from Horrid, especially the last one. Good, clean anger in a novel where things appear to need its clarity to move. And HOW COOL is it that Mainely Murders is a.) actually a bookstore, because that name is adorable, and b.) IS IN A BOOK YOU'RE READING. Your life is deliciously meta.
I have sweater vest envy AND want to go to the library with George C. Scott now. We would research the HELL out of something.