B

Ill Will

Ill Will is NOT a romance. It does not have a happy ending. It features graphic violence against animals, women, and children. In the latter cases, the violence includes rape. The ending is depressing as hell.

BUT.

I would recommend this book to the tiny cohort of people who share my conviction that Wuthering Heights is a gothic (and highly political) horror novel as opposed to a love story. This book begins immediately after Heathcliff leaves Wuthering Heights, having been rejected by Cathy. Heathcliff finds himself crossing England on foot, accompanied by a young girl named Emily (a little on the nose with the name there, but OK). Emily claims to be a medium, and the two earn a patchy living by channeling the dead at graveyards. The plot thickens when Heathcliff has the opportunity to learn who his biological parents are. When he learns who his white father and black mother were, his desire to extract vengeance on his biological father overrides any larger plan, and comes at a terrible cost even as it gets Heathcliff the money he needs to transform himself into a gentleman.

This novel works as a kind of bildungsroman crossed with horror. Heathcliff’s England is a dystopia in which both city and moor are cold, colorless, and unwelcoming. I can’t recommend this book to anyone looking for a happy read. Even the word “enjoyable” doesn’t seem to apply. Yet, the novel is so sharply drawn in terms of character, action, and setting that it has earned an uneasy spot on my keeper shelf. For the right reader, this is a finely crafted gem. The B rating is because the novel feels random – we drop in at the beginning and drop out a the end. I also remain undecided on whether the graphic depictions of violence, sexual and otherwise, were necessary or gratuitous. Still, the book is a weirdly fascinating depiction of terrible people in a terrible place at a terrible time, and of the deep, intergenerational wounds left by slavery, sexism, poverty, and violence.

– Carrie S

I am William Lee: brute; liar, and graveside thief.

But you will know me by another name.

Heathcliff has left Wuthering Heights, and is travelling across the moors to Liverpool in search of his past.

Along the way, he saves Emily, the foul-mouthed daughter of a Highwayman, from a whipping, and the pair journey on together.

Roaming from graveyard to graveyard, making a living from Emily’s apparent ability to commune with the dead, the pair lie, cheat and scheme their way across the North of England.

And towards the terrible misdeeds – and untold riches – that will one day send Heathcliff home to Wuthering Heights.