An old house perched near the sea, a beautiful woman pursued by a ghoulish murderer with a one-track mind, an ominous storm that wipes out all connection to the outside world: The classic elements of Gothic fiction are alive and kicking in Mary Higgins Clark's very first thriller, Where Are the Children? What's also evident is Clark's determination to renovate the time-honored but creaky Gothic formula and give its heroines something more to do than shiver and swoon. She clearly succeeded: The book, first published in 1975, has gone through more than 75 reprintings and has recently been reissued in hardcover.
When Clark began writing Where Are the Children?, she was a young widow and a working mother of five school-age children. Her writing time was carved out of a few hours before dawn each day, before the demands of her kids and her day job as a radio scriptwriter intruded. She knew from hard experience, therefore, that a woman must be prepared to rely on herself to deal with life's tragedies and challenges. Surely one reason her novels have been so astoundingly popular -- especially with female readers, a loyal following that has helped anoint her "The Queen of Suspense" -- is that, at the crucial moment in every one of her stories, her otherwise traditional heroines take a deep breath and fend for themselves. No white knights show up to rescue the dazed and deluded wives and the terror-stricken young mothers who populate Clark's thrillers. Some good men help, certainly, and are on hand to offer solace and champagne after the peril has passed. But when a mystery needs solving pronto, it's always the gals who wise up fast and get the job done.
The plot of Where Are the Children? is every mother's nightmare -- and it's interesting to ruminate on how Clark, as a mother herself, could explore this particular horror with such precision. When Nancy Harmon was married to her first husband (a fellow with peculiar erotic tastes), she had two children, a boy and a girl. One terrible day, they were found murdered, and Nancy was accused, then acquitted, of the crime. She subsequently remade her life by moving from California to Cape Cod, dyeing her gorgeous red hair a nondescript brown, remarrying and having two more children -- a boy and a girl. On yet another terrible day, these two little kids disappear from the yard outside Nancy's house. Everyone -- including the police, the reporters who suss out Nancy's identity, Nancy's wonderful second husband, Ray, and Nancy herself -- wonders if Nancy might just well be the culprit. Perhaps she's so mentally disturbed that she did away with both sets of children without really being conscious of her actions. Or perhaps there's a malevolent force stalking her and her family, gaslighting her into taking the blame.
Nancy transforms in this tale from self-doubting good girl to female avenger. One issue to think about is whether it's more acceptable for women in literature to be seen as assertive, argumentative, even violent as long as they're acting in service to others, especially children. A larger point for readers to ponder is why Gothic tales of terror, such as this one, have long been the literary province of women -- from the 18th century's Founding Mother of mayhem, Ann Radcliffe, to Mary Shelley, the Brontës, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Daphne Du Maurier and Clark herself (just to name a few in the suspense sorority.) What is it about this age-old literary recipe calling for labyrinthine landscapes, duplicitous men and damsels in distress that women readers and women writers find particularly compelling? Is the Gothic novel, traditional or modern, just entertainment? Or does the Gothic formula, in general and as realized in the neo-spooky form of Where Are the Children?, provide a frightening cover story for excursions into deeper societal and psychological fears?
Join me for an online discussion of Where Are the Children? at noon on Thursday, May 30, at www.washingtonpost.com. And please join Mary Higgins Clark, Nevada Barr, Karin Slaughter and me for a discussion of their books on Tuesday, May 6, at 6:30 p.m. at the Omni Shoreham Hotel, Regency Ballroom, 2500 Calvert St. NW. •
Maureen Corrigan reviews mysteries for Book World.
