Do you sometimes feel like you're just an American girl running away from a house with one lit window that's full of dark secrets and maybe Nazis? Me, too! Fortunately there's an entire literary genre devoted to us: gothic romance. Between 1960 when Victoria Holt's Mistress of Mellyn made hearts beat far too fast to be entirely respectable, and around 1972 when the first bodice ripper, The Flame and the Flower, started to heat things up past the point of decency, hundreds of gothic romances hit paperback racks and today we're going to pit three of them against each other to see which is the ultimate goth rom.
OUR HEROINES
Weighing in from Dunsan House it's Lynn Richards, "She was not oblivious to the fact that she had been graced with lovely, long black tresses, sloe-eyes, well-shaped lips and a good chin...though in her opinion her hips were somewhat larger than she would have preferred."
Let's give a warm Deathmatch welcome to Lynn and her fat hips who have come to Dunsan House in Wales to be a governess!
Stepping up from Barrow Sinister it's Amanda Smith, "One thinks of 'Amanda' as a tall, slender, sophisticated blonde with a long jade cigarette holder...Unfortunately, I am barely five feet two, furnished with a mop of curly black hair and eyes to match, and while reasonably stacked at the top, I am equally stacked at the bottom." And she's got a personality to match. As her father says to the president of Wellesley College, “You can’t turn out nothing but leaders; my daughter is a perfect follower, which will give the others something to practice on.” Or, as Amanda herself says, "If you put me on an island with Casanova and Frank Harris they would talk to each other.”
A big Deathmatch welcome to Amanda and her boring personality who have come to Stierna Castle in Sweden to be the secretary on an archeological dig!
Last, but not least, it's Nan Richmond, who isn't shy about her looks. "There were times, and this was one of them, when Nan was startled by her own beauty...She had never been and never would be drab...with her perfect teeth that made her look like she'd just stepped out of a dentist's office, and the pale, fine skin with its ready blush that would give her a look, typically, of amazed innocence. Wouldn't it be so much nicer to have a Spanish face, with its static, mask-like quality, never revealing the emotions that smoldered within?"
Let's give a hearty Deathmatch cheer to Nan, and her racist othering of the Latin people, who has come to Mexico to meet her fiance's family at their castle, Ixta Parque!
THEIR STRUGGLES
Lynn, Governess of Dunsan House
When her husband died in India, Lynn decided to move to middle-of-nowhere Wales and take up a job as governess for a simpleton child so she'd never love again. Her self-care got interrupted, however, because it turns out that Lord and Lady Dunsan shipwrecked their brother to death, stole his child, and now pretend the little mooncow is theirs while they slow poison him, and they keep his mom locked up in a secret room, high on laudanum, and out of her cotton picking mind. Nolan, the bestial, not-unattractive, horny houseman, creeps around secret passages loaded with rats, the screams of the madwoman echo through the halls at midnight keeping everyone awake, and there are some very tense breakfasts. To be honest, everyone's working Lynn's last nerve.
DOES LYNN ARRIVE AT DUNSAN HOUSE DURING A STORM?
Yes.
DOES LYNN GET ROOFIED?
Yes.
Amanda, Secretary of Stierna Castle
When her friend has to hang onto her archeologist boyfriend by following him to another, lesser dig when he doesn't get his dream job working for the Children of Scandinavia, dum-dum Amanda signs up to secretary in her place for archeology enfant terrible, Justin Adams. "Wow," she says on meeting him. "He was a hunk of a man!" Unfortunately, Justin requires someone to get the poison out of his man sacs on the regular and Amanda is not that kind of girl, so Justin recruits a local to drain the venom from his trouser snake. Amanda also learns a lot about barrows which are lumps in the dirt on top of dead people that archeologists intrigue over. Despite the fact that Amanda has the personality of a doorstop, she falls for a local named Eric Ragnor who has "a little monkey face" and also turns out to be the president of Lufthansa Airlines. He has to save her when Justin Adams' milk maid goes missing and is probably murdered by Justin who has a big barrow conspiracy going on, and Lynn learns folklore no one cares about while men investigate barrows, ghosts put on pageants, and no one ever finds that dead girl's body.
DOES AMANDA ARRIVE AT STIERNA CASTLE DURING A STORM?
Yes.
DOES AMANDA GET ROOFIED?
No, but she tires easily.
Nan, Future Bride of Ixta Parque
Nan is just a simple girl from Minnesota who really wants to make a good impression on her potential new mother-in-law, who calls her cooking "American pig-food" which is not a good start. Grossmama Krale, however, lives in a German castle in Mexico built by her Nazi son who took his pack of Krales to Mexico to start a branch of the Third Reich in this castle, complete with an SS torture dungeon so, you know, those who live in Nazi-built gothic castles shouldn't throw swastikas. By the time she's been there a week, poor Nan has gotten lost walking from the car to the front door while carrying her own suitcases, almost been crushed by a falling statue, been yelled at by a Nazi for being 4 minutes late to breakfast, had her clothes ruined when a giant gila monster drops down on her from her bed canopy in an assassination attempt (before being decapitated with a pike), had to listen to her boyfriend extol the virtues of capitalism and discuss sulfur mining at her endlessly, and gotten pushed into a pool although, as Hans her fiance says, maybe she fell in the pool because is she actually smart enough to tell the difference between being pushed from behind and falling in by herself? No, Nan agrees, she's probably not. Finally, she winds up in the forbidden lower levels of Ixta Parque where she discovers that Hans' father didn't bunker suicide with his BFF Hitler, but is living in the downstairs dungeon, tastelessly decorated with Nazi memorabilia and a scrapbook of all the Jews he murdered, oh, and it also turns out he killed Anne Frank.
DOES NAN ARRIVE A IXTA PARQUE DURING A STORM?
Yes.
DOES NAN GET ROOFIED?
Yes, by her own "Special Minnesota Egg Coffee."
Irony, thy name is Nan.
AND THE WINNER IS...
Lynn is out of the running immediately because she's kind of a pill, which leaves Amanda and Nan. On the one hand, Nan is way too into her own looks and Amanda seems to be pulling into the lead with the self-deprecating way she knows that she has zero personality. However, as self-aware as she is, she still has zero personality and mostly reads folklore and lights cigarettes. On the other hand, Nan's mother-in-law hates her, she gets pushed into pools by suspicious Germans a lot, she has to sleep at the foot of her mother-in-law's bed in a cot to take care of her when she's sick, she tries to show off to her prospective sister-in-law by playing "I Left My Heart in San Francisco" and "Getting to Know You" on the piano before sis-in-law says, "I'm not very good either" then tears off an hour of Chopin that leaves Nan in tears, launches into Debussy's most difficult concerto, then throws herself to the floor wailing, "Leave me alone! Why won't everyone leave me alone!" before running from the room. Also, Nan wins a Horse vs. Volkswagen Bug race and kills a Nazi.
WINNER:
Nan.
DOES DUNSAN HOUSE BURN DOWN AT THE END?
Yes.
DOES STIERNA CASTLE BURN DOWN AT THE END?
Yes.
DOES IXTA PARQUE BURN DOWN AT THE END?
Yes.
It's a goth rom world, everyone. We're all just trying not to get roofied by Nazis or burned to death in it.