In Elizabeth Hand’s seductive, slow-burning gothic novel Unspeakable Things, 18-year-old Olivia Madden enjoys a privileged yet precarious life in the 1920s. She’s the neglected daughter of Peter, a closeted, once famous actor whose career has long been in decline and now lives at Kerrith Hall, a rented, understaffed estate on the Cornish moors. Despite living outside of polite society with his longtime male companion, Peter clings to a facade of respectability and expects Olivia to conform to society’s expectations, for his protection and reputation as much as her future.
Having lived outside of convention for so long, Olivia knows little of society and wants nothing to do with it now. She has no interest in finishing school or getting married or even wearing women’s clothing. She prefers to wear boys’ trousers and a cap, and sometimes goes by the name Oliver, all habits her father tries to squash. Amid that tension, the one person Olivia is most drawn to and increasingly passionate about is Tamsin, a near feral girl she meets on the moors—a dark and untamed Heathcliff to Olivia’s fair and beautifully rebellious Cathy.
“We may not dare to look for ourselves, so writers and artists do it for us.” Elizabeth Hand on the eternal allure of the gothic and the liberation of the 1920s.
That meeting turns Olivia’s quiet life on its head. Attraction turns to infatuation, then a volatile mélange of love and obsession, which Hand’s bold writing brilliantly captures. But even as their affair ignites, a sense of violence, just barely contained beneath the surface, permeates the text. When a man who may have threatened Tamsin goes missing, that’s just the start.
The central relationship is reckless, but Hand makes it clear that Olivia always had an edge. Years before meeting Tamsin, just at the end of World War I, before her family moved to Cornwall, Olivia had observed wild celebrations on the streets of London. She’d been too young to understand the reckless abandon and release, but even then she knew she “wanted to be a wild animal too.” The fierceness and yearning were in her all along.
Hand masterfully uses the gothic to explore the tumult of the ’20s, when queer culture was both tantalizing and scandalous, and Unspeakable Things captures both the beauty and the danger of the era.
