[Review] The Death of Jane Lawrence
The making of truth is belief…
Rare is the book that can thwart your expectations at every turn. To do so requires a deft hand and knowledge of conventions that feels almost…magical. Getting to encounter a book like that, that sees the walls and boxes you have built for it and slowly tears them down brick by firmly placed brick, is nothing short of enchanting. Imagine my delight, then, when I discovered Caitlin Starling’s The Death of Jane Lawrence, a book that seemed absolutely set on laughing in the face of my every plot prediction all the way through the last page.
Jane is a methodical woman. She tethers herself to the world not through her relationships with people but through her business-like connection to their numbers. Faced with the choice to either marry or return to her childhood home and the ghosts of memories too painful to let surface, she sets out on a plan to marry the local surgeon, presenting it foremost as a business proposal through which they hardly have to interact at all. But the surgeon, Augustine Lawrence, though equally pleased and baffled with this remarkably perfect proposition, has secrets of his own. Secrets he would rather keep isolated and buried as deeply as possible. As he and Jane grow closer and more intimate almost despite themselves, Jane must face the truth of all hastily planned marriages to people you’ve just met: perhaps the man she married is not the man she thought she knew at all. The further she goes into his labyrinthine mystery, the more she must ask herself, is the man she loves worth dying for?
I’ll be honest about a few things up front: 1) the cover to this novel is so gruesomely, intricately beautiful on first glance it led me to request the book before I’d even made it halfway through the summary; 2) because of the first glance at the cover and my own expectations I fully expected this to be a Frankenstein-esque story; 3) I was not right, but I wasn’t not right either. Jane Lawrence dances among the fields of Gothic horror at its peak romantic and creepy, maniacally cackling at the reader’s audacity for predicting the plot’s next turns while turning stomachs. Part Du Maurier, part Shelley, part Bronte, Starling calls upon the powerhouse voices of haunted horror before her and bends them to her own will.
There was never a point in my reading of this novel where I knew where it was going to take me, but there were several where it seeped under my skin enough to force me to set it down for a bit in search of some lighter fare. Starling’s ability to conjure worlds with her words is so vivid and demanding that I often did not feel the story’s tendrils creeping up on me until they had tightened around my throat to catch my breath. If all that sounds a little hyperbolic, tell me, what was the last book that made you look askance at mirrors and windows and the angles of your houseframe? That made you jump at every unexpected noise?
Perhaps it worked its magic so well on me because I simply did not expect it to. I knew, of course, that it would be good — I have been fortunate in my granted choices to almost never be disappointed — but I did not expect it to dive so deeply into the darkness it probes. Even the one detail of Jane’s past that comes up often enough to feel a bit repetitive is eventually turned on readers with an icy and effective hand. Here there lie ghosts and body horror, secrets and magic, and the shifting fabric of truth itself. Starling is your guide through the fluctuating waves of belief, and though you may enter her domain confident in your path, you will come out the other side more than a little bewildered at the journey and the sights she had to show you.
I would like to thank NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.
The Death of Jane Lawrence comes from St. Martin’s Press on October 19, 2021.
