There are few things I love more than digging my teeth into a good, solid Gothic story, and there are few modern authors who do it as superbly as Carol Goodman.
I love the modern-style Gothics, which evolved naturally as the role of women in our society and culture has; whereas in the Victoria Holt novels I loved so much, they were rarely professional, working women unless they were a paid companion or a governess (governess of an unruly, undisciplined child was a particular favorite of hers), while the heroines of Phyllis A. Whitney often had some kind of job or professional background. Goodman’s women are often teachers or writers, with a classics background and education, and Goodman is a very literate, smart writer as well.
River Road is no exception to that rule, either.
She came out of nowhere.
I was driving back from the faculty Christmas party. I’d had a couple of glasses of wine but I wasn’t drunk. Distracted, sure, what with Cressida dropping that bombshell and the scene with Ross, but not drunk.
I didn’t see her. It ws dusk, that dangerous hour when day slides into night and deer sneak out of the woods. I’ve lived here long enough to know that. I’ve braked a hundred times to watch a doe lead her fawns safely across the road. A lot of people hate the deer. They eat gardens and carry ticks. But I have always thought they were more beautiful than any garden I could grow and loved them for Emmy’s sake, who thought there were as magical as unicorns.
It was on that blind curve just before Orchard Drive. Everyone takes it too fast. I, of all people, should have known that too, but I was distracted nd my vision had gone blurry for a moment. I’d lifted my hand off the wheel to wipe my eyes and something hit the bumper. A horrible thump I felt in my chest. Then something white scrolling upward like a long scarf unraveling, its body weirdly elongated like one of those cave paintings from the South of France, a hunter’s dream of a spirit deer flying across the cosmos.
That throwaway, almost easy to miss because it just sounds poetic line about “scrolling upward like a long scarf unraveling” is actually incredibly important to the story, and serves as yet another example of Goodman’s powerful skill at her art.
Everything matters in her books–nothing is just by chance.
This book–with the terrific opening, where it becomes soon clear we’re dealing with a narrator who might not be entirely reliable–is set in the upper Hudson valley small town of Acheron which also is home to a campus of SUNY, which is where our unreliable (maybe) narrator is a creative writing teacher. Nan Lewis published a book some years ago, got the job and moved up to Acheron with her husband and daughter, Emmy–who is killed by a hit-and-run driver on the River Road–there’s a terrible blind curve on the road, and this is also where Nan hits the deer. Worried about the wounded deer, she looks for it to see if it needs help, walks into the woods looking and in the falling snow, ends up falling asleep under a tree. She eventually makes it back to her car and drives home, only to find out in the morning that a student of hers, Leia Dawson, was killed by a hit-and-run driver the night before on the River Road…and with the damage to her car, she is the number one suspect.
Had she had too much to drink? She was upset–she was denied tenure and found out at the party, screaming at her ex and department chair, Ross, before storming out to her car in the cold and falling snow. Was it deer she hit, or was it the student?
As Nan tries to get to the bottom of what happened that night–having horrific flashbacks to her daughter’s death, drinking too much, her life a complete mess–she slowly learns that while she was wallowing in misery and alcohol in her house, a lot was going on right under her nose at the campus, with students and teachers involved in strange schemes and secrets, all leading to a thrilling and suspenseful climax during the height of a blizzard, as a horrified Nan has to save herself while still processing all the secrets and lies she’s unraveled.
Layered, complex, with a strong cast of fully developed characters with interior lives, this is Carol Goodman at her finest.
Queer and Loathing in America 