The opening lines of Mary McGrory’s review of Crow Field, Boylen’s first novel, in the New York Times captures what might attract some readers and repel others: “Anyone who things that a Dali canvas should be wired for sound or that the Ancient Mariner would be the perfect dinner guest should be entirely charmed with Crow Field. Though a few critics appreciated what she tried to do, most found her choice of characters and plots too weird for literary fiction yet not weird enough to fit with a genre label like horror or science fiction. Her three novels were published in the age of Eisenhower and Father Knows Best, when men like Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs could get away with writing about outsiders and fringe lifestyles but women had to conform to stricter stereotypes. Margaret Boylen was a writer ahead of her time. While I wouldn't say it's in my top ten of haunted house novels, it definitely kept me turning pages, making it one I'd recommend.Margaret Boylen, from the dust jacket of The Marble Orchard. While it can become a bit boggy interrupting the flow, overall, it's a good read, another book that will probably be appreciated mainly by niche readers or people interested in discovering previously-unknown authors of the supernatural.
Family relationships are put in the spotlight, as is the age-old debate between faith and reason, with the narrator of this tale often changing his own ideas and beliefs as he sifts through the past to find answers. While The Scarlet Boy is an unsettling, creepy ghost story and a good haunted house tale, there's a lot more going on here than just a simple haunting.
Aside from the fact that there's a bit of extraneous stuff in this novel (in my opinion) that sort of detracts from the eerieness of the main story line, it turned out to be a good read.įor a small bit of plot without spoilers, I've posted about this book in my reading journal here, or just keep reading. Always on the lookout for new-to-me, obscure authors, I came across a reference to this book in some other book, and decided to give it a try.
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