In this remarkable novel, Margaret Millar returns to the themes of death and terror which first made her reputation as a writer. It concerns a New York family who rented a house on the California coast in the hope of a tranquil summer. Mark Banner was a young, successful publisher. His wife. Evelyn. was bright and competent, and very much afraid of losing her husband. When Janet Wakefield returned from her travels to take inventory in the house she had rented to the Banners, Evelyn recognized an enemy at sight. The covert struggle between the two women for the possession of Evelyn’s husband, and her daughter, Jessie, gradually became a fight to the death.
The story covers only three days, but it has the compactness of an ancient tragedy. It strikes deep into the life of its characters, and into the past which had changed a strong and beautiful woman to a figure of frightening evil. Much of it is seen through the eyes of the child. Jessie, who is Mrs. Wakefield’s first convert and her final victim. The dark relation between the imaginative eight-year-old and the desperate woman mounts gradually toward a peak of intensity. But at the end the terror is subtly changed to pity. Mrs. Wakefield is not a villainess of melodrama, but a woman whom we pity because we understand her.
Margaret Millar’s new novel is daring, deeply disturbing, yet marked by unusual beauty. Its love passages between Mark Banner and Janet Wakefield are real and moving.
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