(no subject)

I accidentally left my e-reader at home the other day, but fortunately I have taken to carrying around a tiny emergency Gothic novel with me at all times. This time it was The Locked Corridor, which turned out to be one of the most hilariously bizarre paint-by-numbers Gothics I have yet read.

I want to make it clear: many of my favorite Gothics are balls-to-the-wall nonsense plot points, but the prose is perfectly enjoyable. The prose in this book is like someone dutifully began connecting a bunch of dots with the minimum effort possible, and then got confused somewhere in the middle and also connected in a bunch of dots from someone else's connect-the-dots, still with the absolute minimum effort imaginable.

Our protagonist is Emily, a late nineteenth-century wealthy orphan!

EMILY: oh I just know my marriage will be happy, if not for the jealous ex who lives in the house
ME: hm
EMILY: and the fact that my husband unrequitedly loved my identical twin before her tragic death
ME: HM
EMILY: and is suspected of her murder
ME: CHILD

[freeze frame]

EMILY: yep, that's me. I bet you're wondering how I got myself into this situation...

( I'm pretty sure I forgot some plot points in the summary below, there are just SO MANY )