On the back cover of “Gothictown” we’re told the novel has echoes of “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson. I hadn’t read that story in decades, so I did. This 12-page story is a masterpiece. In an unnamed town of three hundred souls the people gather once a year, draw names from a box and then stone to death the unfortunate loser. Every name is in the box. Everyone has agreed to the ritual. The underlying purpose of this ancient, agrarian pagan ceremony is: “Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon.”
It would have been a really good thing if Carpenter’s protagonist, Billie Hope, had read “The Lottery.” Billie and her husband, Peter, and their daughter, Meredith, are living happily in New York City when the pandemic strikes and she is forced to shut her successful restaurant. In anguish, depressed, Billie does not know what to do next, when she receives an email from Juliana, Georgia, a small town two hours northwest of Atlanta.
Juliana has been failing and there are many empty houses and stores. Billie can buy a large Victorian home for 100 dollars—a kind of urban homesteading—and set up a needed restaurant on the main street. Peter, a PhD in psychology, is a therapist and sees clients mainly online. In a burst of adventure and optimism, they move to Georgia. They are made welcome. Billie sets up her restaurant and the town supports it.
The town is eerily pleasant, but they learn it is run, entirely and authoritatively, by just a few families, “The Old Guard”: Minettes, Clebornes and Dalzells. These families control the town government, mayor’s office, most businesses and the police force. The reader, not Billie, learns a bit of the town’s history in the first four pages of this 362-page spooky thriller.
In 1864, Sherman’s army is approaching. To protect their lucrative gold mine, the owners force the workers, all women and children, inside, seal and hide the entrance. After Sherman passes, they open the mine to discover they are all dead. The descendants, the “First Families,” forgive themselves and reshape this greed-driven murder into a religious ceremony: a sacrifice to save Juliana.
Of course, Biblically, you are supposed to sacrifice your OWN sheep or your OWN son, not someone else’s, but they so thoroughly convince themselves that in the ensuing 160 years, whenever difficulties arise, a “sacrifice” is made. Life in this false Eden soon gets complicated and scary for Billie and her family. Peter has headaches, insomnia, then narcolepsy.
Billie senses that under the veneer, something is really wrong. There are odd goings-on, even deaths and disappearances, but who can they ask? As in some science fiction stories, the person you want to confide in, the sheriff for example, may be one of “them,” his body already snatched. Billie slowly, painfully uncovers the town secrets, and we watch, captivated, as she gets deeper into danger and slowly, painfully gets through it.
