Joseph, a scientist, insists that nothing supernatural is going on, and he calls in a doctor to examine both mother and daughter. Constance rises from their bed every night to sleep in a chair beside Angelica’s bed to protect the child from this horror. And when she resumes sexual relations with Joseph, the phenomena get more vivid and terrifying. Angelica seems perfectly happy with the arrangement, but once the move takes place, Constance begins experiencing strange phenomena – unusual, inexplicable smells and noises. But now Joseph demands that the child be moved to the nursery they had prepared for her. For the first four years of her life, Angelica has slept in a bed at the foot of Constance and Joseph’s. The trauma of the failed pregnancies and the difficulty of Angelica’s birth have made Constance nervous about both Angelica’s health and her own. The premise is this: Constance Barton, after two miscarriages, gave birth to a daughter whom she and her husband, Joseph, named Angelica. There are several high-concept ways to describe Arthur Phillips’ intriguing, sometimes head-spinning “Angelica.” It’s a wickedly ingenious deconstruction of a Victorian ghost story, but it’s also a whodunit, as well as a what-, when-, where-, how- and especially whydunit. “Rashomon” meets “The Turn of the Screw.” Wilkie Collins rewritten by Vladimir Nabokov. Set at the dawn of psychoanalysis and the peak of spiritualism's acceptance, Angelica is also an evocative historical novel that explores the timeless human hunger for certainty.īONUS: This edition contains excerpts from Arthur Phillips's The Tragedy of Arthur, The Song Is You, Prague, and The Egyptologist. While Angelica is reminiscent of such classic horror tales as The Turn of the Screw and The Haunting of Hill House, it is also a thoroughly modern exploration of identity, reality, and love. The mother's failing health and the father's many secrets fuel the growing conflicts, while the daughter flirts dangerously with truth and fantasy. Are these visions real, or is there something more sinister, and more human, to fear? A spiritualist is summoned to cleanse the place of its terrors, but with her arrival the complexities of motive and desire only multiply. In the dark of night, a chilling sexual spectre is making its way through the house, hovering over the sleeping girl and terrorizing her fragile mother. As the family's tragedy is told several times from different perspectives, events are recast and sympathies shift. Mother, father, and daughter provoke one another, consciously and unconsciously, and a horrifying crisis is triggered. The novel opens in London, in the 1880s, with the Barton household on the brink of collapse. Angelica is a spellbinding Victorian ghost story, an intriguing literary and psychological puzzle, and a meditation on marriage, childhood, memory, and fear. From the bestselling author of The Egyptologist and Prague comes an even more accomplished and entirely surprising new novel.
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