Chapelwood

by Cherie Priest

September 1, 2015 · Roc

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I hadn’t intended to review Chapelwood for Smart Bitches, but as soon as I told my fellow Bitches that I was reading a book in which Lizzie Borden fights Lovecraftian monsters with an axe, something really alarming happened. Their eyes got really big and they started drooling and tentacles sprang forth and reached out towards the book that was inconveniently located in my hands, and they gibbered, “GIMMIEGIMMIEGIMMIE.” So clearly there’s some overlap between people who like to read books about true love and happy endings and people who like to read books about New England women slicing the heads off eldritch horrors of the night. If you fall into the overlap category than this review is for you.

Chapelwood is the second book in the Borden Dispatches, not to be confused with The Lizzie Borden Chronicles (a TV show). I reviewed Maplecroft over at Geek Girl in Love and I RAVED about it. I don’t give grades over there but I would have given it an A+. In brief, Maplecroft tells the story of Lizzie Borden, who lives in the New England town of Fox River shortly after both of her parents were murdered and she was acquitted. The book contains some historical fact, but plays loosely with dates and so forth. Anyway, the story is told from the point of view of Lizzie, who patrols her house every night using her axe to kill the Eldritch Horrors that rise from the sea and crawl around her house every night. The story is also told from the point of view of her sister (Emma), her lover (Nance), an unusual police inspector (Simon Wolf), the local doctor, and an increasingly deranged professor from Miskatonic University. There is romance in the sense that Lizzie and Nance are lovers, but it’s not happy romance because frankly nothing in the book is happy. It’s a Lovecraft homage, and that means no one is having a good day.

Chapelwood takes place thirty years later, in 1920. Lizzie, who is now in her fifties, gets a surprise phone call from Inspector Wolf. It seems that there has been a spate of axe murders in Birmingham, Alabama, and it all seems tied to a new church, Chapelwood, which holds services in an old building in the woods outside of Birmingham. One of the survivors of the axe murderer draws a picture of a woman he calls “The Grey Lady.” Wolf recognizes the woman as Nance and asks Lizzie to help him figure out the connection. This time around the story is told from the points of view of Ruth, whose father goes to the church, Wolf, Lizzie, and Leonard Kincaid (American Institute of Accountants, Certified Member).

I liked Chapelwood, but not as much as Maplecroft. It should work as a stand-alone but you’ll understand Lizzie’s arc better if you read Mapelcroft first. I think my biggest problem was that Lizzie is very much a sidekick in this book up until the end when she takes a more central role. I loved having her around as an older woman, but she spends most of the book either away from the main action or assisting Wolf with his investigation. When she finally picks up an axe, it’s awesome, but it’s late in the game. That’s unfortunate, because Lizzie is the most compelling character in a story in which most people more representations of ideas than they are fully realized characters (Ruth is the biggest exception here).

Maplecroft was scary. I never actually put the book in the freezer (as Joey from Friends taught us, putting scary books in the freezer is a valuable safety tip), but I did banish it to another room when I was sleeping. Chapelwood is more horrifying in the sense of creating an oppressive atmosphere of dread. While the first book dealt with murder and madness, the second book delves into all forms of bigotry and corruption. It’s harder to read, because while one does not encounter the kinds of murder scenes in Maplecroft on a daily basis, the problems of Chapelwood dwell with us in our daily reality. The only difference is that in the Alabama of Chapelwood, the issues have been exaggerated and allowed to thrive under the influence of some unknowable, menacing supernatural force. I felt that the book was good in the sense of being well written (with a caveat I’ll mention below) but not fun.

Another problem I had was that the voices of the characters, who take turns with first-person narration, tended to blur together. They are also prone to somewhat ponderous thought. They all tend to make little asides as clarification, or to make some philosophical point. In small doses this is endearing but it quickly becomes annoying and in some case rather unbelievable.

I like this book more as I step away from it. It’s more challenging to the reader than Maplecroft because it makes us question our own communities and our own choices. It has fantastic atmosphere and sense of dread. Some of the characters experience truly terrifying visions and the torment of the character who sets the story in motion is well done.

H.P. Lovecraft was a sexist, racist, creepy dude who wrote creepy stories about our cosmic insignificance. Chapelwood plays on this theme in slightly more optimistic ways. In Lovecraft stories, when people become aware of their insignificance, they usually go mad, turn evil, or both. Some characters in The Borden Dispatches have this reaction but others do not. They choose to fight the good fight and celebrate any triumph they can, whether that means saving the world forever or just for now. It’s not a rah-rah book – everyone is very subdued. But their quiet determination to do what they need to do is powerful. On another note, given Lovecraft’s personal and literary racism, it’s rather satisfying that in this book virulent racism is the sign that the evil malignancy is taking hold. While Lovecraft looked at a diversifying America and saw doom, this book sees a diversifying America and sees hope. It’s both a tribute to the best of Lovecraft (the cosmos is a creepy place) and a subversion of the worst of Lovecraft (Chapelwood is firm on the idea that ethnic and religious diversity is a good thing, although I wish it had had more non-white main characters).

One of the fun things about having spent many years reviewing for this site is that I’ve had the opportunity to branch out a bit in terms of reviewing other genres. Of course I review romance. I ADORE romance. But a large portion of our readers also seem interested in comic books and comic book inspired stories, certain kinds of horror stories, and biography. I think that the appeal of these stories goes beyond the fact that many readers, such as myself, simply enjoy reading across multiple genres. I think that readers of romance love to read about women taking charge of their own lives, whether they do it by pursuing romance or by hacking off tentacles with an axe. The ending of Chapelwood is bittersweet at best, but the women in The Borden Dispatches have a marked tendency to face things beyond their control and their choosing strictly on their own terms, and that’s something romance readers might relate to.

It took me a while to decide how I felt about the ending of this story, but I’ve settled on a guarded ‘inspiring’. In any Lovecraft-style story, the hero cannot achieve total victory. There can’t be a happy ever after. But there can be a happy-for-now, and a victory-for-now. It was nice to see the value of small, temporary victories celebrated. With it’s all too timely message of fighting forces of ignorance and intolerance and hatred, Chapelwood may not have been the book I wanted, but I think it was the book I needed. And, as Inspector Wolf says, “Can one really ever get enough of axes?”