A sinful and addictive dark chocolate!

You may have noticed that I have been absent for full five days. In case you are wondering about the cause of my absence from this blog, I had disappeared behind a magical portal opened by a book series that was as sinfully addictive as rich, dark chocolate - Juliet Dark's "Fairwick Chronicles":

For the uninitiated, Juliet Dark is the alter ego of the acclaimed writer of gothic mysteries, Carol Goodman. The same series is also available with alternate titles and with the author's real name on the cover.

"This is where all stories start, on the edge of a dark wood.."

- proclaims the summary of "Incubus" or "The Demon Lover", the first book of the Fairwick Chronicles, and it was enough to send a delicious shiver of anticipation down my spine! After four days of reading the three books in a mad rush, I have finally managed to extricate myself from the haze induced by this series Now that I'm back to my normal state, the time has come to review it :).

Book review: Fairwick Chronicles trilogy by Carol Goodman

This series is a curious, genre-bending, riveting mixture of gothic, paranormal, romance and fantasy - a departure in many ways from Goodman's standard genre, yet retaining her trademark writing style. The first book is the most creative of the series, and shows the author's love for old gothic romances such as Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre", Emily Bronte's "Wuthering Heights", Ann Radcliffe's "The Mysteries of Udolpho" and Daphne du Maurier's "Rebecca". Goodman pays a fitting tribute to the various facets of the gothic genre, both through her heroine Callie's college lectures and through her story.

Cailleach McFay, better known as Callie, has a doctorate in folklore and gothic fiction (I want to study this too!) and has written a popular book on demon lovers in gothic literature. She has been fascinated by fairy tales and folklore since childhood, not surprising considering that her late parents were archaeologists exploring Celtic myths. As a teenager, she had imagined that she had a shadowy companion who came to meet her at night in her dreams. To exorcise the dreams, she had taken up gothic literature as her research area, and ended up specializing in it.

Gothic romance; Source: coolchaser.com

As the book begins, Callie is offered a teaching post at the remote Fairwick college, a lesser known village near New York, in the shadows of the Catskill mountains and bordered by a thousand acres of virgin forest. The description of the village and the college are atmospheric, and I could alomost visualize the vine-covered gothic library and the ivy-shrouded Victorian cottages.

As Callie wanders around Fairwick for the first time, the forest affects her in a strange way:

I paused for a moment at the edge of a narrow trail, peering into the shadows. Even though the day was bright, the woods were dark. Vines lopped from tree to tree, filling every crevice and twisting into curious shapes....

A wind came up and blew out of the woods toward me, carrying with it the chill scent of pine needles, damp earth and something sweet. Honeysuckle?...

I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply. The breeze curled around me, tickling the damp at the back of my neck and lifting the ends of my long hair like a hand caressing me.

Callie sees an old house covered in honeysuckle, right at the edge of the forest, somehow merging with the woods:

It was hidden from the road by a dense, overgrown hedge. Even without the hedge, the house would have been hard to see because it blended in so well with its surroundings....The honeysuckle from the forest had encroached over the porch railings..

I stepped a few feet closer and a breeze stirred a loose vine over the door. It waved to me as though it were beckoning me to come closer..

Above the doorway in the pediment, was a wood carving of a man's face, a pagan god of the forest, I thought, from the pinecone wreath resting on his abundant flowing hair. I'd seen a face like it somewhere before...perhaps in a book on forest deities...

I turned to leave. The wind picked up, lifting the green pollen from the porch floor and blowing it into little funnels around my feet as I hurried down the steps...

The vines that were twisted around the porch columns creaked and strained. A loose trailer snapped against my arm as I reached the ground...

When I reached the hedge, I turned around to look back at the house. It gave one more sigh as the wind stopped, its clapboard walls moaning as if sorry to see me go, and then it settled on its foundation and sat back, staring at me.

I couldn't resist myself from quoting that entire passage because after that eerie description, I was so enthralled that my gothic-loving heart was doing a joyful little jig!:)

Source: www.wvexplorer.com

Callie, of course, can't  resist the pull of the house and realizing that it's up for sale, she impulsively buys it. Her acquaintances, the inn-keeper Diana Hart, and the college dean, Dean Book, warn her that the house is haunted. Apparently it has remained uninhabited for the last twenty years, ever since the previous owner died. Before that, it had originally belonged to Dahlia LaMotte, a popular gothic novelist who had written some bodice-ripper romances at the turn of the twentieth century before they went out of fashion.

Callie begins to have vivid dreams of a man made of moonlight and shadows, and her room is filled with the fragrance of honeysuckle every night.

Each piece of him took shape and weight as the moonlight touched it. It was as if he were made of shadow and the moonlight was the knife sculpting him into being, each stroke of the knife giving him form...and weight....

He felt like a wave crashing over me, a moonlit wave that sucked me down below the surf and pulled me out into the sea, onto a crest...

I must confess that I had been hesitant to pick up "The Incubus" thinking that it might verge on erotica but I need not have worried. In Goodman's deft hands, the descriptions of the physical aspect of love are poetic and passionate, but never explicit. In fact, true to the style of old gothic romances, the more intimate descriptions are largely left to the imagination. Yet the midnight encounters between Callie and her shadow lover manage to convey a deep and boundless passion, almost bordering on obsession:

I was standing in the dark, on the threshold between shadow and moonlight, where he always waited. And someone was knocking....
The moonlight rushed in with the wind - a wind that smelled like honeysuckle and salt - and circled around me like an angry riptide. 
I'd heard somewhere that if you are drowning, you should relax and let the current take you. I did that now and the current turned warm and carried me down into the darkness,...where he lived.

Callie discovers some old manuscripts of Dahlia LaMotte's work in the attic and finds that Dahlia's writing strangely mirrors her own nightly experiences. She begins to suspect that the house  is truly is haunted by a spectre or the gothic setting is influencing her fertile imagination to an alarming degree. As if that wasn't enough, the residents of Fairwick start acting strangely too, and Callie discovers that no one is as they seem on the surface.

Who is the shadow haunting Callie's dreams? Is he a ghost or a figment of Callie's imagination? Is he the same shadow that Callie used to see when she was young? What connection does he have with Callie? Did Dahlia LaMotte dream of the same man? What secrets are the Fairwick residents hiding? Who is Callie really?

All these questions build up slowly in the mind of the reader, as Goodman unfolds her brilliantly imaginative plot. A cast of intriguing characters is introduced, both young and old, who inhabit Fairwick and are an integral part of its chronicles. There are fairy tales skillfully woven into the story such as the tale of Tam Lin, as well as historical details such as the Scottish plague and witch hunts. There are quite a number of surprising twists in the tale, some which left me shocked and wondering how the author would resolve the resultant mess. Sometimes the sweeping tale does become a bit repetitive like in the second book, or mired in complications like in the third book, but the author expertly manages to pull all the tangled threads together by the end.

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What I really liked was that the trilogy evolves into a fascinating saga of star-crossed love - an intensely romantic story spanning magic and reality, encompassing past and present, and spread across continents. To my romance-loving soul, submerging in the story was like indulging in a deep, dark and tempting chocolate, which is sometimes seductive, sometimes sweet and sometimes bitter but which one absolutely can't do without. While the first book is undoubtedly the best in terms of the gothic element, the other two books continue the magical journey of the lovers unknowingly meeting and losing each other, time after time.

What came once here will never come again,
no matter monument nor memory;
all sun-warmed green succumbs to winter's wind...

yet sun will brighten wind so,

one knows that soon green stirs, and wild bees hum.

And summer once more will make winter liar,

but I won't warm. You're all I'll ever desire.

Where does their story start and where does it end? Are they destined to remain separated for an eternity? To know that, you have to read the series :)