Bethany Griffin, The Fall (2014)

Griffin’s third fourth novel is no great departure, concept-wise, from her first previous two (The Masque of the Red Death and The Dance of the Red Death)—that is to say, it is a novel that briskly spins its hand-whisk in the rich cream of Edgar Allan Poe, producing something recognisably Poe-like that is, at the same time, considerably less dense and rich. (‘Cream of Poe’ is like regular cream, except that is, you know: black. And tastes of mausoleums. Goes well with over-ripe strawberries.)

This aerated and rather temporary concoction is The Fall of the House of Usher turned into a novel-length Gothic-y YA yarn. As such it’s all about the mood; Madeline Usher, our point-of-access beautiful, doomed young heroine, wakes up inside a coffin (‘tears wet my cheeks. I cannot breathe. I cannot breath. Blood trickles down my fingernails and I am choking’ [3]) as per Poe’s original story. Indeed, without a knowledge of this original text it seems to me this rather oddly structured tale wouldn’t make a great deal of sense. The problem is, with that knowledge, it feels a little redundant: why do we need this novelisation, when we have the original? Griffin mixes the timeline up (chapters are all named after Madeline’s age, and hop about: ‘Madeline is sixteen’, ‘Madeline is nine’, ‘Madeline is seventeen’ and so on); but the novel drags its heels. Its stacked, black, vinyl heels. The whole is 420 pages long, and could easily have lost 200 or more from the middle without missing them. But, sure: the rather repetitive plotting isn’t the point. The mood is the point. I readily concede that sour middle-aged male university professors are not the target audience for this book. The most I will say is that I tried, when reading, to unlock my inner emo teenage girl, and failed. On the plus side, props to Griffin for actually opening her novel with ‘It was a dark and stormy night’. (Strictly speaking, this is the start of chapter 2; but that’s close enough for government work, especially since chapter 1 reads like a kind of prologue):

Wind and rain, lightning and thunder, a storm throws itself against the House of Usher, rattling every window, including mine. Thunder pounds the earth and the house groans. [5]

And so on: the whole is written in this rather gnashing manner throughout (it’s less fruity than Poe’s prose, though; which is a good thing. Although more fruity than Poe would be hard to achieve. He is the fruitiest of the fruity. Hence—the cream.)

There ought to be a name for the—I think, genuinely recent—cultural logic by which a short, powerful text is expanded into a longer mode, because ‘we’ respect length in a way we don’t brevity. I’m thinking of things like: the, we can agree, dreadful, movie version of The Cat in the Hat; or the many famous short stories (‘We Can Remember It For You Wholesale’ pops into my head) made into lengthy movies, and often then translated back into lengthy prose form as ‘novelisations’ of the original movie. What would we call this, I wonder? And what does it say about us? One thing that strikes me is that this cultural-evaluative bias towards length (‘epic’ as a term of praise, and so on) is happening at a time when or attention spans are supposed to be getting shorter, when our online reading is supposed to be shaped by a twitter-esque logic of tl;dr. What’s up with that?