Beatrice Murray is a pseudonym for Richard Posner, but not the Richard Posner you find when you Google Richard Posner.
According to Gothic Novels of the Twentieth Century: An Annotated Bibliography by Elsa J. Radcliffe (1979):
POSNER, Richard (Iris Foster, Beatrice Murray, Paul Todd, Dick Wine)
Born 10/7/44 in Manhattan, New York.
Education: B.A. Hofstra University, 1965; graduate study at Queens College, City University of New York. He is married, has one child and lives in Selden, New York. Posner was editor of Literary Agency 1967-72 and has been a full time writer since then.
Chris’s fiance Jerry broke up with her because he’d “rather be with the gang right now” than at dinner with her.
I know that I’m overthinking: He actually wants to spend all his time with his friends and never wants to spend time with her because he doesn’t LIKE her and yeah, that doesn’t work, they should breakup. Good riddance.
Or: She literally made a rule that he can’t keep his bachelor friends and he resents her? “You have to really be finished with those other people before you can come to me” is a wild line. If he wants to spend time with them instead of her because she’s being unreasonable, yeah, they should breakup.
She hasn’t said anything about him that makes me think they enjoyed each other but she is really upset and it’s the most tedious part of the book so far. It all feels very shallow.
This book has made me say “Wait, what?” a dozen times in the first 4 chapters.
I got so caught up in Jerry (Chris can’t stop thinking about him, and neither can I?) that I forgot to share this detail; Chris is opening up an old house for a friend who is too busy hostel hopping across Europe to go digging for her grandfather’s will. The house has been vacant for a long time but someone has been keeping it up, fresh linens on the beds, utilities turned on, but best of all, there are creepy clown paintings! For some reason Chris is so drawn to the place she has decided to take some time off her job as assistant fiction editor at Woman’s World magazine and work on her Master thesis there.
“She smiled to herself, a natural, unselfconscious smile, one of her assets. She had others; she was slender and tall. And she had delicate cheekbones and slanting gray eyes. And sometimes, under the right conditions, her shoulder-length brown hair looked auburn (you had to have the proper light).”
This book was wild. The ending was absolutely unhinged. It definitely had that 70s flavor of psychological horror that is almost too unbelievable to be enjoyable but only almost, because I did enjoy it!
Originally published August – October 2021
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