A SUMMER TOO BEAUTIFUL TO LAST... A HOROR TOO GREAT TO BE FORGOTTEN....
Austria, 1912. Young Scottish schoolteacher Isobel MacMurdo travels to Austria, taking up a post as tutor to the daughters of expatriate industrialist Kenneth Barsett. But the girls already have a governess, the mysterious and beautiful Carla – regarding whose influence over his daughters Mr. Barsett has secret fears. For Isobel, this is the beginning of a journey into beauty, passion and terror, and even possibly to the brink of the supernatural, even as the ‘real’ world totters towards violence and chaos and war.
Marty Ross is the author of the just-released Dark Shadows audio drama DRESS ME IN DARK DREAMS, the thriller novels GLASGOW, LIKE A STRANGER and AZTEC LOVE SONG, the Doctor Who audio dramas NIGHT’S BLACK AGENTS and THE LURKERS AT SUNLIGHT’S EDGE, the Rondo-nominated BLOOD AND STONE, plus a string of BBC radio dramas, including THE DARKER SIDE OF THE BORDER, GHOST ZONE, CATCH MY BREATH and the recent ROUGH MAGICK. This, however, is his most ambitious work, drawing on the eroticised gothic of classic tales such as Gautier’s ‘Clarimonde’, Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’, or the more sensuous, romantic side of Hammer Horror; in particular, readers will find it ‘haunted’, but only in the most ambiguous way, by Sheridan Le Fanu’s classic vampire tale '''Carmilla’. But if it is a ‘gothic’ novel, its closest links are perhaps with the discreet, suggestive supernaturalism of tales like ‘The Turn Of The Screw’ or ‘Picnic At Hanging Rock’: stories which seem to have something disturbingly uncanny at their heart, but which leave a good deal to the readers’ imagination as regards where the borderline might lie between the dreams and fears of its characters and some external supernatural menace. Meanwhile, it merges its subtle, suggestive gothicism with the epic scope, realistic setting and romanticism of a historical novel. But, above all else, this is a novel that transcends genres – a gothic romance whose highest aspiration is the evocation of beauty, a sometimes uncanny sun-struck beauty that will prove too beautiful to last…
Ross has already explored this tumultuous era of Austrian history in his BBC radio drama about composer Arnold Schoenberg, A BREATH FROM OTHER PLANETS, but this is a far more ‘cinemascopic’ view of that society famously said to be ‘dancing on the edge of a volcano’. His own experiences working as a mountain guide in the Austrian Alps have informed the novel’s portrayal of its awesomely, unsettlingly beautiful landscape. Whether these experiences have directly influenced the story’s more uncanny elements, he is keeping very much to himself....
Genre: Horror
Austria, 1912. Young Scottish schoolteacher Isobel MacMurdo travels to Austria, taking up a post as tutor to the daughters of expatriate industrialist Kenneth Barsett. But the girls already have a governess, the mysterious and beautiful Carla – regarding whose influence over his daughters Mr. Barsett has secret fears. For Isobel, this is the beginning of a journey into beauty, passion and terror, and even possibly to the brink of the supernatural, even as the ‘real’ world totters towards violence and chaos and war.
Marty Ross is the author of the just-released Dark Shadows audio drama DRESS ME IN DARK DREAMS, the thriller novels GLASGOW, LIKE A STRANGER and AZTEC LOVE SONG, the Doctor Who audio dramas NIGHT’S BLACK AGENTS and THE LURKERS AT SUNLIGHT’S EDGE, the Rondo-nominated BLOOD AND STONE, plus a string of BBC radio dramas, including THE DARKER SIDE OF THE BORDER, GHOST ZONE, CATCH MY BREATH and the recent ROUGH MAGICK. This, however, is his most ambitious work, drawing on the eroticised gothic of classic tales such as Gautier’s ‘Clarimonde’, Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’, or the more sensuous, romantic side of Hammer Horror; in particular, readers will find it ‘haunted’, but only in the most ambiguous way, by Sheridan Le Fanu’s classic vampire tale '''Carmilla’. But if it is a ‘gothic’ novel, its closest links are perhaps with the discreet, suggestive supernaturalism of tales like ‘The Turn Of The Screw’ or ‘Picnic At Hanging Rock’: stories which seem to have something disturbingly uncanny at their heart, but which leave a good deal to the readers’ imagination as regards where the borderline might lie between the dreams and fears of its characters and some external supernatural menace. Meanwhile, it merges its subtle, suggestive gothicism with the epic scope, realistic setting and romanticism of a historical novel. But, above all else, this is a novel that transcends genres – a gothic romance whose highest aspiration is the evocation of beauty, a sometimes uncanny sun-struck beauty that will prove too beautiful to last…
Ross has already explored this tumultuous era of Austrian history in his BBC radio drama about composer Arnold Schoenberg, A BREATH FROM OTHER PLANETS, but this is a far more ‘cinemascopic’ view of that society famously said to be ‘dancing on the edge of a volcano’. His own experiences working as a mountain guide in the Austrian Alps have informed the novel’s portrayal of its awesomely, unsettlingly beautiful landscape. Whether these experiences have directly influenced the story’s more uncanny elements, he is keeping very much to himself....
Genre: Horror
Used availability for Marty Ross's Dances Sacred and Profane