TITLE: The Golden Key
AUTHOR: Marian Womack
320 pages, Titan Books, ISBN 9781789093245 (softcover)
DESCRIPTION: (from the back cover): London, 1901. After the death of Queen Victoria the city heaves with the uncanny and the eerie. Séances are held and the dead are called upon from darker realms.
Samuel Moncrieff, recovering from a recent tragedy of his own, meets Helena Walton-Cisneros, one of London’s most reputed mediums. But Helena is not what she seems and she’s enlisted by the elusive Lady Matthews to solve a twenty-year-old mystery: the disappearance of her three stepdaughters who vanished without a trace on the Norfolk Fens. But the Fens are a liminal land, where folk tales and dark magic still linger. With locals that speak of devilmen and catatonic children found on the Broads, Helena finds the answer to the mystery leads back to where it started: Samuel Moncrieff.
MY RATING: Four out of five stars
MY THOUGHTS: I’m reviewing an ARC kindly provided by the good folks at Titan. The Golden Key releases to bookstores on February 18, 2020.
Those who know me will not be surprised that I was intrigued by the premise: female occult detective meets man with a shadowy past while investigating a very gothic missing-child mystery. And there is much to enjoy in Womack’s novel.
The mood, whether the scenes are set in downtown London or the Norfolk Fens, is wonderfully evocative of the period. I truly felt like I was reading a Universal Monsters movie in novel form at points, and a classic gothic suspense novel in others. (In the London scenes I couldn’t help picturing Dwight Frye as the beleaguered Samuel Moncrieff and Edward Van Sloan as his mysterious uncle.) The author captures equally well the confusion and crowd-inducing claustrophobia of London streets and showhalls, the stuffiness of the parlors and clubs of rich Londoners, the ugliness of remote insane asylums, and the dizzying otherworldliness of rural areas like the Fens.
The point of view shifts between three main protagonists: the confused and grieving Samuel Moncrieff, the incisive and methodical Helen Walton-Cisneros, and the inquisitive but innocent Eliza Waltraud. All three are well-drawn, interesting characters, and dividing the story among them allows the author to show the reader more of the hidden pieces of the world these characters are moving through. Eventually all three threads weave together and the characters learn from each other what the reader has already started to piece together. I don’t think Womack is ever truly trying to mislead the reader in regards to the main plot: it’s pretty clear from early on what Samuel’s secret is (or at least, what part of it is), and it’s fun watching the author drop the clues in the characters’ paths and how they don’t realize at first what they’ve just learned. In the chapters told from the POV of Samuel, his confusion, grief, and memory-loss come through very clearly; anyone who has ever had a traumatic experience will recognize the stages Samuel is going through. In the women’s chapters, Womack shows us a great deal about the way women were perceived at the end of the Victorian period, especially women doing work normally “reserved” for men, and what these women had to do to be taken seriously.
The POV chapters are also interspersed with magazine and newspaper articles about goings-on that surround the main and supporting characters: announcements and descriptions of séances and such. These add to the sense that bigger things are happening than even the characters are aware of, and each feels period-appropriate.
If I have one complaint about the novel, it’s that sometimes it feels like the author is trying to do much. Part of that is the overall tone, which seems to shift from Gothic to Lovecraftian to Faerie story and back throughout the narrative. If Womack is intentionally trying to mislead the reader at all, it’s in what type of story she’s trying to tell: the description makes us expect Holmesian Gothic but there are points where the story feels like cosmic rather than supernatural horror and other points where I expected a member of the Fae court to appear. The fact that the author captures each of these styles perfectly without descending into, say, the purple prose of Lovecraft, mitigates the disjointedness of style quite a bit. (And I should note: I’m not convinced the author is intentionally trying to confuse or mislead the reader: I think she just enjoys all three styles and wanted to incorporate them all into the same book.) There’s also a good deal of attention paid to some subplots that don’t really seem to pay off: the death of Queen Victoria and the details of Eliza Waltraud’s past feel like they should be more important to the main events of the novel (although at least the details of Eliza’s parents add to understanding her character), while Count Bévcar is given more attention in the early pages than feels warranted by the conclusion of the book. The subplot in the second half of the book regarding the way female mediums are investigated for fraud as compared to males also feels like it doesn’t add to what at that point is a fast-moving push towards the novel’s eerie and open-ended conclusion. I expected the Bévcar and Madame Florence subplots in particular to connect more solidly to the main thread than they actually did.
But despite those two minor complaints, this is a wonderful gothic horror novel with interesting characters whose mysteries and fallibility draw you in and make you want to see what will happen next.
My instinct is to give The Golden Key three-and-a-half stars. But as Goodreads and Amazon don’t allow half-stars, my policy is to round up.