Gimme Danger
— Elizabeth Hand. Unspeakable Things. A Novel. Little Brown, [2026].
Unspeakable Things is a brisk, perilous walk along one of those unstable cliffs in Cornwall where the events of the novel unfold. Olivia is just eighteen and something of a tomboy living in a decaying manor where her exiled, widowed father plans a return to the West End with a production of The Tempest. She feels the first storms of her appetite for life and artistic creation ; and also the first promptings of desire when she meets a girl from the neighboring village out on the moor. Liz Hand plays with the tropes of the Gothic mode at all stages from the eighteenth-century origins to the Brontës to Rebecca and the mass-market paperback Modern Gothic. I suspect that Hand has read the essay by Joanna Russ, “Someone’s Trying to Kill Me and I Think It’s My Husband : The Modern Gothic”.
The world of the Twenties is deftly invoked: the social upheaval and glamor, the music and fashions, the contrasts of wealth and poverty. Some boundaries have blurred in the aftermath of the War, but there is an awareness that the privileged class still operates according to laws of its own. In her Author’s Note, Hand indicates some of the histories of the interwar period she mined for the novel, which has a great epigram from Lytton Strachey : “I saw these marvelous people, they were utterly beautiful, but they had feathers where brains should be.” The long house party at Ledges, hosted by the fabulously wealthy Gabriel William Vincent (“Rex”) De Voil, is well choreographed and well catered, and all the feather-brained members of society display their multicolored plumage. The name dropping is fun.
In several novels (The Lat Houseparty, A Summer in the Twenties, and Hindsight), Peter Dickinson summons dark aspects of that Jazz Age world just before he was born. In Death’s Darkest Face, Julian Symons wrote of the life and disappearance of a poet in the Thirties ; the life of his schoolboy protagonist is altered by those events. These excellent novels, however, are retrospective narrations. The hurtling, kinetic energy and atmosphere of menace of Unspeakable Things are experienced in real time. Olivia learns how the world works. She learns quickly and well.
Unspeakable Things is an excellent, transgressive book. Go read it.