Blackened Cottage by A.E. Richards
A young woman is haunted by a past she can't remember. She feels threatened by her father and his lascivious friend. In her efforts to elude the pair and track down her brother, a third man hunts her for his own depredations. Set in England in 1875, the story has a definite Gothic feel to it. Richards is adept at illustrating the scene. The "Blackened Cottage" where Lisbeth, our protagonist, lives evokes fear with every creaking floorboard. The air she breathes threatens to smother her in gloom. Richards doesn't hold back with her descriptive narrative. Every adversity that Lisbeth faces is given its due in highly detailed prose. She gets credit for her inventive metaphors. Here are three brief selections that jumped out at me: There is no response but the wind’s drunken slur. I whisper with the breath of a mosquito's wings... His nails scrape my skull like a wolf scraping soil for bones. The story is primarily told from Lisbeth's point of view. Not only does ...