Gothic Horror Fiction, Old and New

Lately, my favorite fiction has transported me out of the terrors of the present and thrust me back in time. Take Jess Kidd’s utterly mesmerizing third novel, THINGS IN JARS (Atria, 369 pp. , $27), set in a Victorian-era London of gargoyles that “vomit rainwater” and “labyrinthian alleys, twisting passages, knocked-up and tumbling-down houses. ” Bridie Devine, a pipe-smoking, cross-dressing investigator, walks these streets solving crimes.

The case at the heart of “Things in Jars” is that of a missing child, Cristabel Berwick. Cristabel is a “fair-haired child” who “seems to glow … as if she’s carved from bright marble,” with sharp, strong teeth. She can’t speak, but she can hit shattering high notes with her voice, and her eyes change color, “from alabaster, to slate, to polished jet. ” The hunt for her is on.

And what a magical hunt it is. Bridie moves through a Victorian London of ravens and ghosts, apothecaries and circuses, a foggy underworld filled with crypts and stuffy rooming houses. She is accompanied by a handsome ghost named Ruby, a “seafarer and champion boxer” whose tattoos animate in relation to his sentiments. As we learn more about Bridie, we understand that her talents were formed in the house of a Dr.

John Eames, where she grew to admire the specimens Dr. Eames kept in jars, “the human heart … the eye the size of a fist, a miracle of muscle and ventricle … the lung country-clean and pink” that had “drawn millions of breaths before Dr. Eames pickled it. ” One day in Dr.

Eames’s lab, Bridie discovered an infant in a jar, “sound asleep in its glass womb. ” Turning the jar, she sees “at the back of the head, just under the wispy curls at the nape of the baby’s neck, there is a line of scales. Subtle at first, then swelling into a filmy dorsal fin, slight but proud, that follows the spine down to the end in the sweep of a curled tail. ” It is a winter mermaid, a “merrow.

A memory-reading, dry-land-drowning, man-biting sea lunatic. ” The mythology of the merrow and mermaids informs the mystery surrounding the missing Cristabel, and adds layers to Bridie’s investigation. But it isn’t so much the detective story that makes “Things in Jars” such a triumph.