I’m not sure why I have this novel apart from the Poe reference. It’s not on my list of titles I got review copies of nor do I remember buying it.

Still, last October, in honor of the month of Edgar Poe’s death, I read it.

Review: Finding Poe: A Tale of Inspiration and Horror, Leigh M. Lane, 2012.

The blurbs call this a gothic. And, indeed, it is. We have a woman in danger, our protagonist Karina Brantley, and we have a sinister structure, a lighthouse.

But that’s just the start. Karina Brantley isn’t some innocent governess nor unmarried. Her increasingly mad husband, always called by just his surname, was a nobleman back in England and she was a Lady – that is until Brantley murdered a servant trying to blackmail him and walled him up alive. Karina is complicit in that crime.

Brantley takes them to a miserable lighthouse off the coast of New England and seems obsessed by it, taking its measurements and counting the number of its bricks. He becomes increasingly abusive.

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