Description

[From back of paperback edition. DJ Photo from ABE listing.]

Masquerade of Menace.

Lovely young career woman Andrea Leighton came in disguise to the luxurious estate of Seaview Manor. Her job, to pose as the fiancée of the handsome master of this private kingdom. Only in this way could she gain the confidence of his mentally disturbed sister, and discover what secret demons tormented the horror-possessed girl.

But in this place where staggering wealth and shocking guilt went hand in hand, Andrea was but one of many masking the truth. One man stole her heart...another seduced her senses...and neither could be trusted as Andrea realized how many women love had lured and death had claimed at Seaview Manor...and how little she knew of the nightmare danger she had come to fear so much...

Notes

Elissa Grandower was a pseudonym of mystery writer Hillary Waugh, better known for his pioneering police procedurals. He published five gothic romances under the Grandower name.

I hadn't realized, going in, that Seaview's author was a man, but discovering this made a lot of things fall into place. There's just something off about his female characters -- their motivations, their relationship with their own bodies, their interactions with men, and their responses to the male gaze. And most of them are treated pretty shabbily by the author and pretty dismissively by his male characters. I've noticed this in other male writers of vintage genre fiction: I feel like maybe the "separate spheres" nature of traditional gender roles made it harder for men to craft convincing female characters -- to get into their heads, so to speak -- and this certainly holds in the other direction, too.

The writing's also not great -- the terser tone of procedurals might have fitted Waugh's talents better than the descriptiveness of romantic fiction. One interesting sidenote is his use of air conditioning as a signifier of wealth: the Carteret Foundation offices feature an "extravagance of beauty and decor" and Andrea can't "help appreciating the air-conditioned coolness that went with it", she's picked up for her ride to Seaview in "an enormous chauffeur-driven, jump-seat Cadillac with air conditioning", and, later, there's an entire paragraph devoted to her pondering why Seaview Manor has no AC: "It made her shake her head to think that the family had more money than it could count, but they had nothing to combat the heat with." Made me wonder whether he was putting the finishing touches on the book during the Northeast's historic spring 1976 heatwave (NY's Easter 1976 remains its hottest on record at 96F).

There's also a side character -- ugly and quirky -- that I think, with a few changes, could have made a much more interesting male lead. The character development Waugh gives him in the closing pages makes me think he also had an affection for him -- perhaps he based him on himself!

Tags

1970s, American, Big Mis(understanding), United States, Northeast, beautiful/handsome, brave, courageous, business owner, editor, f/m, gothic, hair, dark, heir/heiress, hot-tempered, independent, intelligent, male, millionaire , mystery, rich, romance, single, third-person, tortured, widowed, young

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