DeCarabas > Recent Status Updates

The Death Bride, a story about an ominous supernatural stranger who appears at Camilla's masquerade and refuses to unmask when everyone else has, "You alone keep on your mask" - was the King in Yellow referencing this story??? I'm grasping at straws, I can find no record of Robert Chambers having read Fantasmagoriana or Tales of the Dead and the extra guest is a common trope, but Camilla's not a super common name!

The first story's a comedy! You think of Mary Shelley & co reading these ghost stories and getting the inspiration to write their own - and it turns out it starts with a fun adventure involving a ghost barber who shaves people's eyebrows off. Adjusting my mental image of the Villa Diodati a bit here.

I'm just now realizing they've been using the Julian calendar this whole time! Lovelace starts dating his letters using both calendars, Belford keeps on using only the Julian, and then the final letter is dated only in Gregorian, Samuel Richardson is screwing with me specifically. Anyway this readalong is going to end a week+ earlier than I thought.

Reading the titular story, with the daughter who nobly and patiently bears a previously loving father's attempts to force her to marry someone she doesn't want, the maid placed with her to spy and intercept her letters, her fear of a father's curse... Mary Shelley for sure was a Clarissa fan, right? *googles* She was, read it multiple times in multiple languages, I knew I wasn't just seeing things. It's everywhere.

No letter today, but meanwhile reading the Haunting of Hill House there was a Clarissa mention (and the professor threatening to read Pamela aloud as an insomnia cure) - I never noticed just how many other books reference Richardson before I started reading this.

Today Clarissa's final letters to her family and friends are sent out, and since they're all along similar lines only some of them are included and the rest are just summaries with short excerpts, makes complete sense - but the letter to Anna Howe, of all people?? Only a summary for Clarissa's final letter to Anna Howe??

Clarissa mentioned! Fun coincidence. Quote from Denis Diderot about a friend's reaction: "At this point he seized the notebooks, withdrew into a corner and read. First I saw tears running down his face, he interrupted himself, he sobbed; suddenly he got up, he wandered aimlessly, he cried out as though he were devastated, he reproached the Harlowe family in the most bitter way."

Reading on the corresponding days, it really stood out when a date was set for Clarissa's marriage to Solmes, that pressure of this dreaded event getting closer and closer every day. This past week leading up to the date Lovelace set for their marriage has felt awfully familiar! Confining her, forbidding her letter-writing - the same ways he'd used to pressure her to flee with him, now used against himself, bravo.

Bold of Lovelace to act like it's absurd of Clarissa to suspect he set a fire to get at her - "To suppose I should have recourse to such a poor contrivance"! - when he's talking to people who JUST saw him disguise himself to sneak into her rooms! Also he misattributes Dryden's "Oppose not rage" quote to Shakespeare, and that same mistake is all over internet quote sites - I wonder if that mix-up started here.

Letter XL and Lovelace is now claiming he doesn't care for tragedies (at least not on stage), which is a fascinating thing to say after he's spent this whole story quoting from tragedies. Can't take this guy at his word even about his own tastes.

A secondhand copy without the DVD, I'm reading it mostly for the previous owner's EXTENSIVE handwritten notes in the margins. Thank you Amanda!

Delighted to discover this goes through October day by day, one day per chapter, so I'm reading only a chapter a day as a countdown to Halloween. Five stars for everything so far, ideal Halloween mood-setting.

(spoilers) "I don't suppose you were a singer, not with a voice like yours."

That was alarming enough on its own, but then, some chapters later:

"Damn medic pulled out a body without a decent voice. ... I still can't shake the slight, and definitely irrational, suspicion that the tech medic chose that particular body just to annoy me."

...Well, this is deeply upsetting.