Kate Stanley, Jennifer Lee Carrell’s dauntless Shakespearean scholarturned- director, made a memorable—and New York Times bestselling— debut in Interred with Their Bones. Having chased down her mentor’s killer (and recovering one of Shakespeare’s lost plays in the process), Kate’s fame as a director with an expertise in “occult Shakespeare” catapults her—and Ben Pearl, her partner in crime-solving—into a new production of Macbeth, showcasing a fabled collection of objects relating both to the play and the historical Scottish king for whom it is named.
The Bard’s witch-haunted play is famously cursed, its reputation for malevolence so strong that many actors refuse to quote or even name the play aloud. And as rehearsals begin at the foot of Scotland’s Dunsinnan Hill, it doesn’t take long for the curse to stir. Strange references to the boy actor who first played Lady Macbeth in Shakespeare’s day—and died in the role—pop up. A trench atop Dunsinnan Hill is found filled with blood, and a severed human thumb turns up among the props. And Kate begins sleepwalking, waking early one morning alone atop the hill, her hands smeared with blood.
Kate has no memory of how she got there, but later that day a local woman is found dead on the hill in circumstances that suggest not just ritual murder but ancient pagan sacrifice. With the police more focused on Kate as a suspect than as a possible future victim, she and Ben find themselves in a desperate race to discover a lost version of Macbeth, said to contain rituals of witchcraft aimed at conjuring demonic forces to gain forbidden knowledge. However much Kate would like to dismiss such rituals as superstition, someone else appears willing to kill for them—and for the manuscript said to spell them out.
Marked for sacrifice, can Kate Stanley uncover the killer before she becomes the next victim?
First Line: "Wrapped in a gown of blue-green velvet trimmed with gold, a queen's crown on his head, the boy sat drowsing on the throne near the center of the Great Hall, just at the edge of the light."
Random Quote: "Stirred by our passing, leaves swirled up in eddies that looked, from the corner of the eye, like small animals herding us onward. Rounding a bend we came to an enormous tree, green with moss, its trunk gnarled into the silhouette of a giant's bulbous face staring sadly at the ground."
Review: The first play I remember seeing was Waiting for Godot, but the next was Midsummer Night's Dream. The Godot was utterly simple (as it should be) - just some guys in a blackbox theatre with some stools. I remember clearly how funny it was. The Shakespeare was performed as part of a college festival and we followed the scenes about the campus as they were performed in various locations suitable to the play. I fell in love with it and it remains one of my favorites.
Ellen Terry as Lady MacBeth - Image via WikipediaI spent a goodly portion of my twenties and thirties as a theater artist - first as an actor and then as a director (an activity which appeals both to my love of words and my innate bossiness). I had the privilege of acting in some Shakespeare and have read all of the plays, several of them multiple times. There is something so wonderful about Shakespeare. Wonderful stories told in beautiful language with an incredible flexibility. As an actor you need only trust in the language and the rest will take care of itself. It is a great tragedy that to so many the work is dead - presented as dead, no longer played with - dead words on a dead page. It's so much more. So much fun. So much play.
And then there is the Scottish play and all the amazing and fascinating and Gothic history that surrounds it and its own intrinsic macabre weirdness. It's one of my favorites so I was pleased to pick up this book that sets itself around and about it and even more pleased to find how much fun the book was. An excellent and above all else fun book filled with occult happenings and mystery and danger and just a bit of romance. I loved it (and don't much care whether people want to agree with or disagree with the author's Shakespearean scholarship - it's a Gothic thriller, people, get over it).
FTC Disclosure: San Leandro Public Library
Rating: Orange
YOu had me an gothic! I love anything like this.
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