When Jacy decides to visit her husband Jed’s father for a holiday trip, it will take her far from her comfort zone. Michigan’s Upper Peninsula seems like a whole other world, a place she knows only through cliches. As she’s soon to learn, few of them hold any real water, and she is unprepared for the dangerous situation she’s walking blindly into.
Dr. Ash seems like a sweet man, and his housekeeper Mrs. Brandt is an efficient woman. The house not far from the small town of Iron Mountain (population 7000) and near the smaller village of Barripper (population 300 or less) is a lovely home on sprawling wooded acreage.
The few times Jed had talked about it, he’d described the house in which he’d spent his childhood summers as the cottage, a place in the sticks. Boys’ Life stuff, he’d said with a slight roll of the eyes, calling to mind a rustic cabin, tangle of fishing poles by the door, worn beach towels, a hallway full of flip-flops, hot dogs charred on a rusty kettle grill and slapped on garage sale plates.
But it was no cottage. Low and large and filled with light, sun flooding the windows, streaking the maple beams and brass, it was grander than I could have ever guessed. Inside was forest-green everything: curtains and sofas and lampshades and trim. Like a hunting lodge in an old movie, I thought, like we should all be wearing jodhpurs and high boots.
While Doctor Ash cleaned up, Jed showed me the cozy kitchen with knotty pine cabinets, the brass-fixtured powder room with guest soaps shaped like pine cones resting on fingertip towels, and Doctor Ash’s study, all the greens giving way to an astonishing crimson, the walls covered in crimson damask, the mahogany shelves bulging with crimson leather-bound books. A big fish mounted on crimson baize. (Beware the Woman, 21-22).
The area has a history with Cornish folks and the mining industry in particular. It has big cat problems as well as manly men who stalk and kill the creatures who venture too close to man’s bowers. One such pest, a mountain lion most likely, is howling out in the woods even while Jacy enjoys her first dinner with their host.
Re-exposure to the place where he grew up has an effect on Jed. He reconnects with old friends, revisits old past times of drinking at a bar called Ernie’s Teepee, talks about old loves with an intensity Jacy has not known and feels more than a little jealous of. In fact, she cannot participate in many of these old-time joys because she is pregnant, but she offers her husband blessings to reconnect with his youth. The changes she observes in him, however, are unsettling.
The isolation ramps up when her husband’s considerate father gets aggressive in his care suggestions. So, when Jacy encounters an incident with bleeding, he’s the one to call an old friend—Dr. Craig—who diagnoses placenta previa and advises her to take plenty of bedrest.
Jed, who lost his mother during his arrival in the world, freaks out and starts to talk about “someone taking responsibility for their baby,” meaning himself. Her father-in-law’s behavior gets sinister, and the men start to talk about her like she isn’t in the room. A frantic phone call to her ob-gyn suggests there is nothing to worry about, this sort of an issue can self-correct and often does. However, the way Dr. Craig and Dr. Ash paint the picture is more dire. But they are older men, maybe not as versed in newer approaches to things. And this is a woman’s issue after all.
Do their recommendations have a more sinister agenda? Are they stripping away her agency, imprisoning her in this lovely, large, but creepy house? Or are the hormonal fluctuations Jacy is undergoing (thanks pregnancy!) painting things in an extreme light? The queen of suspense, Megan Abbott, plays around with gothic and some horror elements in a contemporary tale of women, men, and the strange things that can happen in isolation with Beware the Woman.
As a born and raised Michigander (though I have not lived there for over two decades), I enjoy seeing my old home state showing up in fiction. And to see the Upper Peninsula represented is a special treat. I am from the Detroit area in the lower peninsula, but I have several fond memories of visiting my Yooper relatives up north. Michigan is not just the Detroit locations we see in crime fiction by Elmore Leonard or the historic suspense of Loren D. Estleman. It’s vast. Contains multitudes. That author Megan Abbott also has some experience with the state (she was born there) shows through in a few lovely ways and an appreciation both of the multitudes of the area itself as well as the stereotypes non-Michiganders compose about the people who come from there.
One of my favorites from the text is from a sequence where Jacy first meets her father-in-law, a flashback sequence to her and Jed’s early salad days:
I’d had this idea of him—from Jed’s stories, from the blurry father-and-son-at-graduation photo, radiator-curled, on Jed’s bookshelf—that he was an old-school dad, a Midwestern white dude, the kind all those fish-tackle and golf-club Father’s Day cards are for.
So I was surprised how dapper he was, handsome like Jed, but Jed in nice clothing, a fine wool suit and stylish Italian loafers alongside Jed’s flannel and jeans. His voice so low and gentle, a little burr in it, I felt instantly at ease. He started by teasing me gently about the sort of woman who’d take on an Ash man. Then he said he was sorry we hadn’t met before, but not to blame Jed. After all, he lived way up in the tippy top of Michigan, the vacation home of Jed’s childhood, and didn’t travel much in his early retirement. After a lifetime of travel for work, he laughed, all I want to do is stay home, in my study, with my books and my bourbon.
I said that sounded pretty wonderful to me.
But mostly, he said, he wanted to make sure Jed was taking good care of me and whether he washed the dishes and to make sure I don’t, not once, pick up after him, not even a stray sock.
As if Jed ever left socks around, or anything.
What matters most to me is that whenever you’re talking he’s listening.
What matters most to me is that you feel loved. Jed is, in some ways, still learning to love. (Beware the Woman, 11-12)
It’s enjoyable to see a rug tugged out from under a character’s feet. The difference between the illusion manufactured and maintained by popular entertainments and the reality hit the character like a slap.
One of the other fun aspects to the novel is seeing just how many gothic and dark fantasy elements are here. Dr. Ash is a loaded name for readers of cosmic horror; it’s the guise Joseph Curwen adopts when his descendant resurrects him in Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. And Mrs. Brandt certainly echoes some of the qualities of the Fairy Queen, tethered to the land and the family that lives on it when we initially get to know her. The core concept alone screams gothic: A naïve young woman comes to a large estate and discovers sinister events and people who might not be what they appear. That she’s prone to leap before she looks—she fell into marriage through passion and instinct, instead of taking any real quality time to get to know her boyo—only makes the possibilities more suspenseful.
Where Megan Abbott excels as a storyteller is the dispensing of information. She has a knack for giving us a good sense of the scene, dialogue that’s pregnant with double meanings, and a magician’s knack for misdirection. We don’t really know what we haven’t been told until the noose cinches just a little closer, and we wonder if Jacy’s heightened self-preservation instincts are seeing real threats or making mountains from molehills. Is she really losing agency bit by bit, or is she blowing things out of proportion?
One of the conceits for gothic horror is the unreliable narrator. In Poe and the literary descendants, this often takes the form of a character who is psychologically unbalances, crazy as a soup sandwich in other words. Abbott employs a different tactic, giving us a character who is sane and stable, but who is also compromised by natural biochemistry and a growing sense of concern. She’s not crazy, but she doesn’t possess all the facts, and as she’s prone to react from the gut (which has been shifted around to make room for a developing lifeform, after all) she’s prone to interpretations that seem reasonable from her perspective and yet might not reflect the situation.
Unfortunately, the opening is a slow burn one. Can be a tad frustrating for readers looking for thrills and chills from page one. Abbott takes her time developing the characters and the setting before introducing them to the wringer. I was put off by the first couple of chapters—they read well, but they didn’t quite grab the throat. However, by the time Jacy meets Dr. Craig we may well be surprised to see ourselves already enmeshed in suspenseful situations aplenty. And from then on, the sense of things pushing in uncomfortably close, of Jacy’s terror and fury as she wonders who are these people? It gets great.
Beware the Woman is a terrific tale of suspense. With a thorough understanding of the tropes of romantic suspense, gothic romance, domestic suspense, and gothic horror fiction, Abbott has crafted a tale that might start slowly but soon enough catches us by the throat and refuses to let go. Well worth a read.
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Beware the Woman is available in eBook, paperback, hardcover, and audiobook editions.
“Losing Agency One Crumb at a Time: Megan Abbott’s Beware the Woman” is copyright © 2024 by Daniel R. Robichaud. Quotes and cover image taken from the G.P. Putnam’s Sons eBook edition, released in 2023.
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