Derrick Austin

triptych by focusing on the woman and the house that holds her captive. The title gestures towards George’s literary influences (Charlotte Brontë, Daphne du Maurier, and Jean Rhys), but the novel also draws upon – and subverts – elements of the Gothic heteroromantic fantasy as outlined by Joanna Russ in her essay, ‘Someone’s Trying to Kill Me and I Think It’s My Husband’ (1973). As Russ explains, part of the draw of the contemporary Gothic romance is the thrill of not knowing whether that brooding, handsome man is the love of one’s life or a homicidal maniac.

The novel’s protagonist, Hannah Prendergast, is a woman returning to her childhood home on the Victorian coast after some years away, having recently inherited her father’s house through her grandmother. Her intention, when she arrives, is to prepare ‘Sargasso’ for sale, but the longer she stays there the more she struggles with the idea of leaving. Her relationship with her boyfriend is threatened by the reappearance of an old childhood friend, Flint: a quintessential Byronic hero, Flint exhibits shades of Heathcliff as well as Sylvia Plath’s ‘man in black with a Meinkampf look’.

Through flashbacks, we learn more about the untimely death of Hannah’s father, a brilliant architect who designed Sargasso, but we also encounter more questions than answers about Flint. In the present day, the adult Hannah is falling more and more under his spell – or, perhaps, like any good Gothic heroine, it’s the house that seems to bring him to her that she loves first and foremost.

To reinvent a wheel that has already completed many a rotation is not an easy task, and in one sense there’s nothing hugely innovative about Sargasso. As with its predecessors, there’s a skulking presence lurking in its figurative attic, and readers familiar with the genre might well see the twists coming long before the end. But it’s so beautifully written, so skilfully plotted, such a masterpiece of tension and atmosphere, that it hardly matters. There’s a reason so many of us keep coming back to the Gothic, despite knowing all its tropes inside and out: like Hannah, Jane Eyre, and Mrs de Winter before her, we return to these houses of unreason in our dreams. g

Georgia White is a PhD student at Monash University. She researches Victorian Gothic and supernatural fictions.

Miracle Play

All morning, I read about Christian mystics. After a long bath, I wear a caftan and silver ring. Intolerable hours of waiting for you. I plunge my hands in ice water.

The sun is red and low when I meet you by the fountain. Houses on steep hills light up. You speak to me with your deep voice like a man hammering in a forge. I thrill at the sound like a dog.

We watch a miracle play performed by homosexuals. The homosexuals play saints or abstractions. One man wears antlers braided with holly. Chastened in the last act, a lascivious friar loses his wig.

Longing is simple. However, you are a man with a skeleton, a will, a past. We argue on our way to your place for dinner. My arm around your waist, drawing you near, is a gesture of peace.

We eat salt-baked branzino stuffed with chilies. We slowly pour cold water into our liquor until it clouds in the glass. Wind buffets the screen door constantly. I sob in the bathroom.

Feathergrass shifts in the moon’s lean light. It is now so late the exact hour does not matter. Passing the blunt, you exhale smoke like a sun god. When we kiss I kiss your skull.

Derrick Austin ❖

Derrick Austin is the author of Tenderness, forthcoming from BOA Editions in September 2021, and Trouble the Water (BOA Editions). He is a 2019–21 Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University.