When the Natural World Becomes an Extension of the Secret
One of the most memorable opening lines in all of fiction comes from Daphne DuMaurier’s Rebecca: “Last night, I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” But, there are other lines on that first page that are the most striking to me. As the unnamed narrator makes her approach to Manderley in this dream/nightmare situation, she describes the natural features that surround her as “encroaching” and “insidious.” The trees that line the lane have branches that mingle “in a strange embrace,” and she notices the “monster shrubs and plants” that welcome her to her new home.
The action of Rebecca is presented in the past tense, so the narrator has the benefit of hindsight. On her initial approach to Manderley (in non-dream/nightmare form), she was brimming with anticipation for the promise of a new, bright future with a handsome, hunky husband. Not so fast, of course! On this first page, she sets the reader up with the notion, just through the description of the natural world, that the story that follows will be strange, at best, and monstrous, at worst. Within its walls, Manderley contains either straight-up devilish people or ones who are very, very dodgy.
I was thinking of Rebecca’s opening page while I was tinkering with the beginning of Clever Creatures of the Night. I just love it when a character’s high hopes get completely torpedoed. It’s fun to read, and possibly even more fun to write. This is because one of my favorite tropes in fiction is one of which DuMaurier was an absolute master: the town with a secret, or the foggy, overgrown English country house with a secret, or something else along those lines. This trope persists throughout Gothic novels (the isolated castle with a secret!), Westerns, noir, horror, and beyond. In this kind of story, there are, obviously, secrets. In order to protect those secrets, some of the character build up walls, set up booby traps, resort to gaslighting and threats and (possibly, probably) violence, while other characters, in their effort to uncover those secrets, plow through those walls, leap over those traps, and often suffer mentally and physically.
The natural world becomes an extension of the secret; it’s threatening and dangerous, full of brambles and creepy-crawlies. I have always been a sucker for setting. In the landscape of rural Texas, where Clever Creatures of the Night takes place, there is so much beauty, but there are, as with any beautiful place probably, uglier things lurking beneath. I don’t always want to anthropomorphize nature, but I do love when it there’s the suggestion that nature could take on the characteristics of its inhabitants, or, in opposition to that, that it could be in outright revolt against them.
About the Author
Something bad happened here.When Case arrives at a run-down, ivy-covered house tucked deep in the West Texas woods, an ashy haze lingers in the air and the sky is tissue-paper pink. Her best friend Drea has been living here with a few classmates Case has never met, and Drea asked her to visit in a letter dated two weeks ago.But now Drea is nowhere to be found.Drea’s roommates can’t—or won’t—answer questions, leaving Case to search alone. She finds bits of Drea’s journal hidden in the tiles of the bathroom wall, in a beat-up cooler by the muddy river, wedged into the frame of her closet door. As Case pieces together Drea’s life in this strange house, the roommates’ behavior puts her increasingly on edge—and she’s not the only one. The animals nearby are lashing out, attacking each other, threatening the humans.Something bad happened in this house. Something that must be connected to Drea’s disappearance. And if she gets too close to the truth, Case just might be next.
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