A charming baron with a questionable past, a gothic castle with a possible haunting, a lonely mystery writer working through her past traumas: What could possibly go wrong? Anna Biller, the director of the cult film The Love Witch, tells the sordid fairy tale of lonely author Judith Moore in Bluebeard's Castle.
Judith, always pushed aside for her much more beautiful sister, falls in love with an attractive and mysterious nobleman named Gavin, who seems to be straight out of her novels. He pulls out all the stops and says all the right things--so much so that Judith, for the first time, "wanted to be merged with another, to be carried away by voluptuousness, to be inside of the sublime." Gavin whisks her away: a quick marriage, a beautiful and adventurous honeymoon, intense sexual games of power, and then the purchase of her very own castle.
But things start to splinter and crack. The mystery of Judith's lover begins to eat away at her. He is also quick to anger, moving from a sweet and supportive husband to a wrathful beast in the blink of an eye. Despite this, Judith repeatedly finds ways to forgive or explain away her husband's behavior, tempting readers to yell, "don't go back into that house!" It's such a classic and fun horror trope, however, that readers will watch her go back into the house anyway. Anna Biller's writing is full and luminous, mirroring the classic fiction of Mary Shelley and Charlotte Brontë--but with a modern bite that keeps readers going back for more. --Dominic Charles Howarth, book manager, Book + Bottle