Take the story of Lizzie Borden and cross that with Lovecraft’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth”.… This is essentially the plot of Cherie Priest’s 2014 horror novel Maplecroft. This book has been on my to-read list for years now, and I finally got around to listening to the audiobook. If you love bold women swinging axes, casual queer representation, and eldritch beings emerging from the sea, you’ll want to pick this one up, too!
Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks… You know how the story goes. But what if Lizzie had a very good reason for doing so? Something fishy is going on in the town of Fall River, Massachusetts. In the years since their parents’ deaths, Lizzie and her older sister Emma have made a fortress out of their mansion, Maplecroft. Lizzie toils in the basement laboratory, trying to learn everything she can about the strange things that emerge from the sea and how to arm herself and her sister against them. Emma studies marine biology and keeps up a sophisticated correspondence with the most learned men in the field—when her illness allows her to. But this slice of relative peace that they’ve carved out for themselves might not last. When other residents of the town start showing symptoms similar to those that the elder Bordens exhibited in their final days, it’s time for Lizzie to ready her axe once more.
There’s some particularly clever world-building going on here. You might be asking yourself, where exactly is the overlap between the real-life Borden murders and H. P. Lovecraft’s cosmic horror mythos? The simple answer is: location. Fall River, the historic home of the Bordens, is a seaside Massachusetts town not unlike the setting of many of Lovecraft’s stories, including “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” Cherie Priest cleverly situates this real-world location in proximity to one of Lovecraft’s fictional settings, Miskatonic University, and maintains the atmosphere of New England Gothic that pervades his writings. In Maplecroft, real historic details of Lizzie Borden’s life are interwoven with fictional horror elements that borrow heavily from Lovecraft. For example, the Borden family was known to have been mysteriously ill in the days before the murder. In Maplecroft, the symptoms of this illness are depicted as resembling a transformation into the unblinking, gray-skinned fish-frog people of Innsmouth.
Cherie Priest also utilizes that classic literary technique so common to the Gothic: the epistolary novel. One version of the found document framing device, epistolary novels are written entirely as though they are composed of letters and/or journal entries. In this case, both Lizzie Borden and her sister Emma keep journals in which they reflect upon the strange occurrences at Maplecroft. Their ally Dr. Seabury combines his personal reflections with field notes about his clients and medical observations on the strange illness sweeping the town. Even the story’s main antagonist, a scientist who succumbs to the call of some eldritch being, documents his own descent into madness. By switching between first-hand journal accounts of various characters—interspersed with the occasional telegram or newspaper clipping—Maplecroft aligns itself with such celebrated Gothic works as Dracula, Frankenstein, and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone.
If you haven’t read this one yet, now is the time! You can find Maplecroft on shelves at your favorite local retailer or order it online and support both indie bookstores and The Gothic Library in the process using this Bookshop.org affiliate link. If you’ve already read it, let me know what you think in the comments!