Owl Manor: The Dawning by Zita HarrisonMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
I began reading Owl Manor: The Dawning, a Gothic Romance, with some trepidation; not because this genre of novel makes me feel nervous or fearful about its scary content, but because I grew out of this type of book long ago. When I was much younger I enjoyed Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Pit and the Pendulum and other similar novels, usually looking forward to a bit of madness and murder that would take place within the walls of an old castle or manor house. Notwithstanding this doubt I read on and found the first half of Zita Harrison’s book intriguing through her excellent portrayal of Eva, the main character, and the sorry domestic situation in which Eva found herself when she rushed into her marriage with Lewis. This was during the early years of the 19th century when the plight of women was to be much less than equal in status, et cetera, than men. We are completely sympathetic to this clever, attractive and strong-willed young mother who hates the poverty and struggle of her life. The desperate circumstances that she and her family are in when they move to the gold rush region of Denver, Colorado, change for the better when Eva becomes a servant at Owl Manor – enter the crazy madman, Mr. Bradstone.
From this point onwards Eva’s behaviour towards ‘the master’, and more seriously her intrinsic character, changes so much that I began to suspend my belief in the story. While I quite understand that some heroines, such as Elizabeth Bennet and Jane Eyre, in historical novels seem destined to fall for the flawed male character that shares the limelight with them in the novel, in this book I found it stretched the credibility too much. Apart from this I found the typos and edits throughout and the rushed final chapter also spoiled my enjoyment. There are very few ‘surreal’ novels of the ghostly, ghoulish, gothic or fantasy type that can dispel my overall feeling of “nonsense” when I read them. The books of Mervyn Peake, J.R.R. Tolkien and Dennis Wheatley will always, for me, take a lot of beating.
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