A curious blend of Marvyn Peake’s “Gormenghast” trilogy and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”, we are taken behind the walls of a claustrophobic castle where everyone has been shut up for years, in fear of a deadly plague that has claimed most of the population.
The author has imagined what might have happened if Poe’s plague had lasted for years rather than a few months. Everyone in Eldridge Hall pretends that the plague doesn’t exist. It also leaves everyone acting as if the outer world doesn’t exist—an unhealthy way of thinking, as you can imagine. Like Troy during the siege, food is running scarce. Morale is low but everyone tries to keep on a bright cheery façade.
In another castle, people are also hopeful that matters might improve. But here the ruler of the castle isn’t a madman. People have been forced into new roles because of the plague (just the same way women might step into male-assigned roles when all the men are off at war). It’s forced them to improvise, find new depths to their characters and assay work that they might not have taken otherwise.
This is a world of reinvention, deceit, struggle, hope, madness, invention and new opportunities. It’s a tale of a world upheaved by massive death brought on by an unstoppable disease. For those of us who lived through the worse of the AIDS in the 80s and are still in the grip of Covid, these opening chapters remind us of the resilience of the human spirit when our collective backs are to the wall.
The author has imagined what might have happened if Poe’s plague had lasted for years rather than a few months. Everyone in Eldridge Hall pretends that the plague doesn’t exist. It also leaves everyone acting as if the outer world doesn’t exist—an unhealthy way of thinking, as you can imagine. Like Troy during the siege, food is running scarce. Morale is low but everyone tries to keep on a bright cheery façade.
In another castle, people are also hopeful that matters might improve. But here the ruler of the castle isn’t a madman. People have been forced into new roles because of the plague (just the same way women might step into male-assigned roles when all the men are off at war). It’s forced them to improvise, find new depths to their characters and assay work that they might not have taken otherwise.
This is a world of reinvention, deceit, struggle, hope, madness, invention and new opportunities. It’s a tale of a world upheaved by massive death brought on by an unstoppable disease. For those of us who lived through the worse of the AIDS in the 80s and are still in the grip of Covid, these opening chapters remind us of the resilience of the human spirit when our collective backs are to the wall.