I have a weakness for gothic romances. I used to love them when I was in high school. Back then, they were published as slender paperbacks featuring a girl in a nightgown, her hair whipping behind her. She was usually leaning into the wind at an odd angle, turning around to stare back at the huge house behind her, looming like a big, huge….um…phallic symbol.

What those books did brilliantly was bring into play the creepiness that accompanies a truly alpha male. The truth is that most American women love to read about Christine Feehan’s and J.R. Ward’s wounded warriors, but they go home to nice men who know their way around the dishwasher. We love alpha, but that kind of uber-alpha? OK for fiction. In gothics, there’s the serious chance that someone you love - someone you’re falling in love with, perhaps - is crazy. Really crazy. Murderously crazy.

Gothics take that distrust and put it squarely in the middle of the picture. Then gothics disappeared. So where did that slightly creepy, falling-in-love, weirded out sensation go? I think it went South, literally. Southern novels seem to be able to skirt the edges of normal, and suggest that fear and love sometimes go hand-in-hand.

I just finished reading Karen White’s The Memory of Water. It’s creepy, all right. This is from the first page, when the heroine is thinking about the Atlantic Ocean:

I tried to forget the sting of salt water in my eyes, the slippery feel of the tide pulling the sand out from under my feet. Of being underwater and not able to breathe as water rolled over me, cascaded around me in a watery rug, sucking the air from my lungs. And the feeling of my mother’s hands slowly letting me go.

Ooooo! I read this at night. I should say: I kept reading this most of the night. This is a love story that wades right into the question of craziness. The heroine, Marnie, has come back to her childhood home for the first time in ten years. In that time, she hasn’t even spoken to her sister Diana. But once she comes home, secrets start unraveling…

The Memory of Water is a beautifully written book, in which the ocean sings throughout - as a dangerous force, as a place of beauty, as a monster to conquer in a sailboat. Like any good gothic heroine, Marnie falls in love with the wrong man (her sister’s ex-husband), and also like those heroines, she learns to control her own fear. There’s a lot here about mothers and their ability to injure their children; there’s also a lot about mother’s love, and its enduring, fierce nature. Once this book starts racing toward the end I challenge you to put it down!