New England Gothic

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Two things today. No, three.

One.  My dad was the music critic for the old Chicago Daily News. As a result, he got to see many productions before the rest of the world.

One was Kismet. (I mean—the musical, Kismet.) Another was West Side Story. Yup. West Side Story. In press previews.

Many years later, I asked him: did you know, when you heard it? When you heard This is My Beloved? Or Tonight?  Did you know they were special?

Yes, he told me. I did.

Two. And it’s the same for books. I get asked to blurb a lot of books. A lot. And often, I say no. I truly do not have time. And I do not want to give a book short shrift.

But sometimes, I say yes.  And then—when the book is fabulous, I feel as if I—like my dad—I have been privy to something special. Something that the rest of the world will soon discover.

Doug at launching Mysterious Books

Three. Meet Doug Burgess. And his (Publishers Weekly starred reviewed!) Fogland Point.

And a copy of his debut novel to one lucky commenter! My name is on the cover. With Nick Petrie, and Michael Koryta. See? Fabulous.

What is Fogland Point about? Please welcome Doug Burgess to tell you.

New England Gothic: 

Mystery and Memory in a Rhode Island Village

When I was a kid, my Uncle George figured large in our dinner conversations. There were stories of his war exploits, his travels around the world, the time he met film star Peggy Hopkins Joyce on the Fall River Line ferry to New London and proposed (unsuccessfully) somewhere in Long Island Sound. Finally I brought up the nerve to ask why this remarkable person was never invited to our house.

“Because he died in 1939,” my father answered.

Growing up in a damp and ancient house deep in Swamp Yankee country, the dead were everywhere around me. Our once-large Rhode Island family had dwindled down through the generations until the only remnants were my grandparents, parents, brother and myself. Yet both my elementary and high schools were named after relatives, as was the posh university across the street. The many branches of the family tree lent their names to half the streets of Providence and Newport. 

My father liked to pull the car into random cemeteries, point to a weathered piece of granite and announce brightly, “There’s your Great-Aunt Lydia!”

All this could make a child morbid, or worse. In my case it gave me a curious sense of time. My grandparents, both near-centenarians at their death, had been born when ice was delivered in horse carts and there was still an Austro-Hungarian Empire. 

But when they spoke of the past it did not seem so long ago: the people they described were as real to me as my friends. Vignettes from their lives were offered like a basket of rolls at every holiday dinner: Grandpa Butler gifting his wife with peaches at Christmas because he fancied peach jam, Cousin Betty feeding Alka-Seltzer tablets to the despised seagulls that terrorized her Chihuahua, Uncle Walter in his fisherman’s sou’wester paying for a Steinway piano with a scaly roll of hundred-dollar bills. 

Soon I, too, began telling their stories—eventually, as my grandmother’s mind declined, I told them back to her.

The places, likewise, did not seem impossibly distant, but that was because they were still there. Like much of New England, Rhode Island never changes. The main street of my parent’s town looks much like it did when John Quincy Adams passed through on his way to Washington; the town library where I borrowed my first Agatha Christie was once a congressional hall that voted down the U.S. Constitution in 1790. 

Even the furnishings of my house unmoored me: in school there were Game Boys and Backstreet Boys, yet each evening I wrote my calculus homework on a table brought back from Burma in 1850 and slept in a bed that had birthed three generations of ancestors.

When I came to write Fogland Point, history, memory and place were much in my mind. The story of a young man who returns to the small Rhode Island village of his childhood to take care of a grandmother now coping with dementia, only to discover a body in the house next door, there is much beyond the mystery that is both personal and autobiographical. 

What few people realize is that dementia is not just about what one forgets, but remembers.

As it progressed in my Nana’s mind, she began to move through time at random. One moment she would be a little girl describing the fixtures of her parents’ house in Riverside; next she would begin a conversation with her friend Florence who died in the ‘80’s. 

Once in our car she became convinced that my dad, her son, was abducting her from school and said angrily, “My father is going to be so mad with you!” But then she turned and saw me in the back seat and immediately asked how my studies were getting on. It was as if she had finally transcended the fragile bonds of past and present that I had brushed against my entire life.

Dementia brings the concept of the unreliable narrator to a new level, and this, too, I wanted to explore. Were my grandmother’s memories to be believed? Were her confessions to be trusted? Was my Great-Uncle Bob Daniels really a pedophile, as she suddenly and startlingly claimed? Secrets came pouring out of her, but each left more questions than answers. Much of this translated into the novel.

 Nevertheless I was surprised when a friend read an early draft and said, “Well, you certainly brought Southern Gothic to Southern New England.” So surprised, in fact, that I looked up Southern Gothic on Wikipedia. 

And there it was: “deeply flawed, disturbing or eccentric characters who may be involved in hoodoo, ambivalent gender roles, decayed or derelict settings, grotesque situations, and other sinister events…”

Substitute hoodoo with the Congregational Church and this could have been on the dust jacket for Fogland Point. The world of a dementia sufferer—and those around them—is indeed a kind of gothic landscape where the veneer of the familiar overlays horrors, real and imagined, beneath.

There is a line in the book that strikes particularly close to home: “The house looks just the same as it always has…like nobody has told it the bad news. All my grandmother’s things are waiting for her to come back.” The backdrop remains both homey and comforting, even as the story becomes increasingly bizarre. This was my experience with my own grandmother, and I expect for many others as well.

That porous barrier between real and imagined takes on an increasingly desperate dimension as the disease progresses. We want to hold onto the memories before they are gone for good. A plot device that frames much of the novel—a series of stories told into a tape recorder by multiple narrators—came from one such reel I discovered myself in the family library.

 On it was my father’s youthful voice, and my great-grandfather’s, which I had never heard. Dad asks Grandpa about life during the Depression. “What Depression?” Grandpa wonders. Already the confusion has begun to claim him, as it would his daughter. Sometimes I think I wrote Fogland Point out of fear—that I, too, must tell my stories before it is too late.

I certainly did not set out to write a New England Gothic mystery; on the contrary, in their speech, mannerisms, histories and lives, each of the characters is as real and down-to-earth as I could make them. But the phlegmatic New England Way is a mask we all wear. Anything ugly, unsightly or not-quite-right is shunted behind the house, hidden in the garden shed, so that we can present a pleasant face to company.

In that sense, Rhode Islanders make the best murder suspects anywhere—we conceal everything. The exquisite distress that family and friends experienced as my Nana began voicing her truth is mirrored by the characters in Fogland Point; as Aunt Constance says in the novel, “You shouldn’t pay too much mind to the things she says. She can’t keep stuff inside anymore.”

New England also lends its atmospheric presence to gothic mystery: no craggy moor or swampy fen was ever so desolate as Easton’s Beach on a blustery November afternoon. I chose the town of Little Compton partly because of family connections, but mainly because of its rugged beauty and curiously isolated location, a peninsula jutting out into the North Atlantic without even a bay to protect it. 

The place names were so evocative that I sometimes feared to include them, lest the novel seem garish: Quicksand Pond, Despair Island, even Fogland Point itself. In rendering them I tried to remain as true to the landscape as possible (although my father experienced a moment of panic when he realized, after consulting the map, that Fogland lay just over the town border in Tiverton. Oh, well).
If Fogland Point is gothic, it is only because Rhode Island is equally so: a place where the dead are never truly gone and the past seems forever present. Gothic mystery doesn’t need rotting plantation houses or Spanish moss. A whitewashed Colonial, a neatly trimmed yard and a secret that can’t stay hidden will do just as well.

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Whoa. Fabulous. And this is a terrific book. SO—do you love Gothic novels? What does that mean to you? And what do you think about what Doug says?

And a copy of FOGLAND POINT to one very very lucky commenter!

"Elegant prose, a veritable Chinese box of puzzles, and authentic, well-rounded characters make this a standout." Publishers Weekly starred review

Preorder HERE.

Doug Burgess was born in Connecticut. After moving to Rhode Island, where his paternal family has lived for over three hundred years, he received his first education from the Quaker Friends at ses Brown School. Burgess received a BA  from McGill,   a JD from Cornell,  , an LLM from the University of British Columbia and a PhD from Brown University . He now teaches at Yeshiva College.

In 2003, Burgess wrote a dissertation arguing for the legal linkages between piracy and terrorism, and for the possible use of piracy law as a foundation for defining international terrorist organizations. This concept was later articulated in articles for Legal Affairs Magazine,  the National Security Law Report, the New York Times  and other publications. It appeared in book form as "The World For Ransom" (2010). Burgess continues to lecture around the world on counter-terrorism and the law.

Burgess has authored numerous articles for trade and scholarly journals, and one novel, FOGLAND POINT —a mystery set in Little Compton, Rhode Island.

He is a featured blogger for The Huffington Post.