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Kit Mayquist's TRIPPING ARCADIA: A GOTHIC NOVEL is self-consciously Gothic, in the manner not of lurid eighteenth-century chapbooks or nineteenth-century penny dreadfuls, but of literary Gothic fiction. Mayquist checks many Gothic boxes: a damned pair of siblings, one male and one female; a patriarchal villain; and a heroine eager to find out the secrets that lie beyond the manorial doors. TRIPPING ARCADIA takes place in the present, though: specifically, Boston's luxurious Back Bay neighborhood. It's a diverting adventure that modernizes Gothic conventions, a bit of a mashup of "The Fall of the House of Usher," "Rappacini's Daughter," and BREAKING BAD.
Heroine Lena Gereghty (as she says, it rhymes with "clarity") is a medical school dropout from a significantly less tony part of the city, the daughter expected to make it out of her neighborhood and her social class. One of her relatives has already done that: the distant, glamorous Aunt Clare, who has somehow turned graduate study in medieval history and an interest in herbal alternative medicine into a lucrative career complete with residence in rural Italy. I don't know any medievalists who have done the same, but if Mayquist, a medievalist, does, more power to him.
When TRIPPING ARCADIA opens, Lena's father has been suddenly unemployed and injured by an evil corporation and she needs to find work to pay his rent and medical debt. She finds it in the luxe, creepy Back Back house of Verdeau; specifically, business magnate Martin Verdeau and his damaged children: coddled, poetic Jonathan, pale, dying, made to be played by Johnny Depp about thirty years ago; and Audrey, bleached-blonde neglected daughter and a qualified lawyer who doesn't much utilize her education.
Martin Verdeau employs Lena to assist the private doctor he retains for his libertine parties, to make sure that the guests don't overdose and consequently that he and his family stay out of the papers. Verdeau's wild parties are, however, considerably less R-rated than, say, Joseph Moncure March's THE WILD PARTY, first published in 1926.
Lena, outraged at her father's treatment by Verdeau's corporation, decides to turn one of Martin's parties into the Masque of Red Death. That's right: she's going to kill the guests instead of cure them. When that goes wrong and she finds herself falling in love with the seductive, smart Audrey, things begin to get complicated.
Mayquist's characters are cardboard melodrama figures, not fully-fledged people, but that's hardly unusual in Gothic fiction. The story is easy enough to follow, but it's hard to care about anyone involved in it. Lena's father does nothing to justify her risking her life for his, and her plot to kill the goose that lays her golden eggs is, to say the least, unorthodox. However, it's a diverting literary experiment. I look forward to whatever Mayquist writes next.
§ Rebecca Nesvet is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay and co-edits Reviewing the Evidence.
Reviewed by Rebecca Nesvet, January 2022
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