the Indie Horror Book Award-winning Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked, and the Bram Stoker Award-nominated "Through the Looking Glass and Straight into Hell" (Orphans of Bliss: Tales of Addiction Horror). She has a BA from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA from Boston College, and an MFA from the University of Southern Maine.
Carmen applied the Page 69 Test to her latest novel, Beneath the Poet’s House, and reported the following:
Page 69 of Beneath the Poet’s House passes this Page 69 Test with flying colors. Protagonist Saoirse White has just walked from her home on Benefit Street to a career fair on Brown University’s campus. After deciding the career fair is a bust, she goes to leave and literally runs into the man whom she suspects has been following her since her arrival in Providence. Emmit Powell convinces her to join him at a nearby café, and from there, their relationship evolves into something imaginative and intense. The meeting between Saoirse and Emmit on page 69 is the single most important event of the novel.Visit Christa Carmen's website.
With that being said, I don’t love the idea of someone using page 69 as the example of my writing with which to decide whether to purchase the novel. Not that the writing is bad or there’s something I would change, but the interaction captured on page 69 is a moment that hinges more on the position of two bodies in space and time—and their coming together—as opposed to rich characterization or lush description. It also occurs at what is probably the least interesting, i.e., the least gothic or historically significant, setting in the entirety of the novel. Prior to page 69, we see the action unspooling in an old library and beside a possibly cursed fountain, at the former home of Sarah Helen Whitman—brief fiancé of Edgar Allan Poe—on 88 Benefit Street and in an architecturally quaint-and-curious coffee house. After page 69, the action takes place anywhere from an underground séance parlor to the secluded corner of an off-the-beaten-path restaurant, in a hotel room shadowed by the poor vision that comes with too much drinking and along the labyrinthine passages connecting H.P. Lovecraft’s Shunned House to other East Side locations across Providence. In short, the decidedly unthreatening energy of a midday career fair at Brown’s Chaffee Garden isn’t necessarily what I would put forth as the best excerpt with which to form an opinion on the novel as a whole.
For that, I’d encourage you to read at least until you get to walk through Whitman’s rose garden and beyond, into the cemetery frequented by Poe and his poetess, nestled beside a darkly Gothic cathedral. A cemetery where, on foggy nights, the tops of the headstones cut through the fog like rows of teeth.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
