Rating:

A Gothic Horror Novel That Falls Flat

Author: Dorothy Daniels

I’ve been wanting to read Dorothy Daniel’s The Possessed since I first saw the old school paperback with its blood red edges in my mom’s book collection as a kid. The amazing cover art promises a morbid romance, supernatural villains, and a Dark Shadows like setting. What more could you want?

Well, as it turns out . . . quite a lot. Like the actual promised atmosphere. A plot. Realistic characters. A smattering of subtlety. Decent dialogue. An attempt at coherence. . .

Lizabeth, a beautiful young orphan, lives with her equally beautiful twin sister, Lucy. Lucy is willing to do anything to hear from their parents again, so she waltzes into a local séance and gets far more than she bargained for: an ancient evil entity with an axe to grind. This entity is hardly subtle – he loves throwing furniture around and forcing Lucy to write menacing, nonsensical letters. You can practically here the “muhahahahhaha” reverberating in the background. But the twins are resilient, strong, and have a strange, supernatural connection that allows them to share warnings across the distance, saving on phone bills no doubt.

Lizabeth starts to investigate and soon realizes that the ghost (Zachery) will stop possessing her twin if they clear his name. She travels to a little town on costal Maine, where she breaks through the hostile locals to find a handsome man with a sense of guilt (Zachery’s failed lawyer). She finds Zachery’s mansion and learns that, predictably, he was an evil man with a hidden room, a Satanic alter, questionable business processes, and a money grabbing family. It seems that Zachery was put to death – unfairly – for sinking a ship with people still aboard. The ship’s skeleton remains a testament to this misdeed, and the town lynched and hung him. But did he really do it, or was he framed? Any of the relatives, all of whom have shown up for the reading of the will, were capable of duplicity, and with time running out, Lizbeth must appease the ghost, unravel the mystery, start an insta-romance, and wonder around a cliff edge in a flowy white nightgown (because, obviously, you must).

Image by GrumpyBeere from Pixabay

The story idea, campy as it is, isn’t all that bad really. It’s the execution that lacks resonance. Everything is in-your-face, the no-frills, no-logic type of writing of a middle schooler who likes the spooky stuff. The ghost is comedically evil, extremely powerful, and alternately asleep at the wheel, as the plot demands. The twins are naïve, good, devastatingly beautiful, yet strong and resilient. The love interest instantly develops, and the romance is pure and passionate in the face of adversity and murderous relatives, despite the super short acquaintance. All the relatives are salivating for money with little to no human feeling thrown into the equation. And there is such a huge cast – who could possibly keep up with them all?

The story is very short (not even 200 pages), and there is no time for atmosphere. It reads like an outline, one that is just as outlandish and over-the-top as it is ultimately distancing. It’s both too much and too little and would fair far better as a late-night B-movie than a book that promises gothic overtones. And…why is the ship still there? Does no one clean anything in this town?

The ship itself doesn’t make a lot of sense and neither does the actual killer, or the ghost’s sudden need for a clear name despite a lifetime (and death time) of unrepentant evil. The logic is spotty, at best, and everything is whirlwind happenstance, forced drama, and plain, unimaginative writing. It’s all quite tedious and boring. Not recommended, and darn it, I waited with excitement to read this for over 30 years -_-

– Frances Carden

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Frances Carden
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