The Bed I Made by Lucie Whitehouse
My rating: 3/5 cats
if you like contemporary gothic romances, this book will scratch that itch.
this is my reading history with lucie whitehouse:
the first book of hers i read was The House at Midnight, which is very much in the tradition of The Secret History, and therefore directly in my interest zone. then i read Before We Met, which was a perfectly decent book that i made excuses for on account of how much i had enjoyed The House at Midnight, which is the interlocking-judgment system by which i make assessments on my enjoyment of books and which i acknowledge is crazytown. then i backtracked to this one (from my seeecret santa), which is her first novel*, and i’m going to dust off that interlocking-judgment system once more to make excuses for what is an entertaining but fairly cookie-cutter romantic suspense novel.
for me, the appeal of “gothic romance” or “romantic suspense” is in the gothic/suspense part of the genre. i enjoy being unsettled, not knowing what is going on, i enjoy ambiguity and tension and haunting atmosphere and if characters are mistaking terror for passion in the middle of all of it, that’s fine with me but it’s not what brings me to that table.
this one is much more on the romantic side of romantic suspense. you can tell by how much talk there is about chest hair. and muscles.
it’s far from happytown romance, but the driving force is relationships and emotional manipulation and headgame-playing gone wrong more than “what are those noises in the middle of the night and did a ghost move my cheese?” and all that. the tension in this book comes from the “when” rather than the “what” or the “who?”
it follows a woman named kate who flees london for the isle of wight after an intense 18-month relationship goes bad disastrously and she is in fear for her life. kate and richard had the kind of relationship found in romance novels that is all about competition and power and sounds so exhausting to me:
The semi-combative game between us, the bantering exchanges about who had supremacy, appealed to him. He liked the challenge, the competition: it fired sparks between us and, for that reason, I liked it, too. It also appealed to my vanity that I could meet this clever, ambitious man and match him. I loved the thrill of daring to respond to his bait with indifference and firing back a challenge of my own. It hadn’t taken me long to understand that for Richard, things acquired value in direct proportion to their difficulty. I wanted him and so I gave him the impression that he would have to work for me.
and that relationship works for a while until lines are crossed and kate is in too deep to do anything but run away to a place full of happier childhood memories to regroup and figure out what to do with the rest of her life. the isle of wight is, in winter, tourist-free and inhabited by a tight-knit community of locals ranging from suspicious to placidly uninterested in kate and her problems, and she is cut off from both her mainland life and any new distractions in a very isolating situation. her arrival also coincides with the disappearance and assumed death-at-sea of alice frewin – the beautiful and mysterious wife of the beautiful and mysterious peter frewin, a disappearance to which kate attaches personal significance and interest, as she had met alice briefly when she first arrived, and she struggles to follow the gossip of the story’s developments despite the aloofness of the islanders.
the story goes where you expect it to as kate’s old life won’t let her go while a new life unfolds for her on the island, and the cat-and-mouse game between her and richard eventually tightens its spirals just when she’s learning to breathe again. it just takes a damn long time to do so, and the threatening incidents are largely repetitive instead of escalating – emails and phone messages make up the bulk of the stalkery contact until the last leg of the novel.
for me, the characters never came alive, particularly the male leads who both read pretty flat to me. the location is well-chosen and -described, but i never felt pulled into the story enough to achieve the anxiety you need to really enjoy this kind of novel. if you’re a romance fan, this will probably satisfy on that level, but if you’re in the gothic thriller camp, this is probably not your best bet.
i have her forthcoming novel: Keep You Close waiting for me on my nook through netgalley, and it sounds closer in tone and content to The House at Midnight, so i’m looking forward to reading it and appreciating how much her skills have been fine-tuned since her first time out with this one.
bottom line – it’s a fine wine-and-bathtub book, but my expectations were raised with The House at Midnight and i would love to see her top that with Keep You Close. here’s hoping!
* i have since learned i was WRONG, and that The House at Midnight was her first, so whoopsie!
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thank you, secret santa!!!!
(shhhh, you’ll always be secret to me!!)
