Comfort Me with Apples by Catherynne M. Valente

In fact, you could consider many manifestations of the First Wife trope to be variations on this story. I consider this story to be a Proto-Gothic fairy tale, since its plot elements have been incorporated into countless Gothic novels.

Unable to resist her curiosity, however, the wife opens this locked door and behind it discovers the corpses of her husband’s former wives. When she moves into his luxurious home, her husband forbids her from entering one locked room. The French folktale “Bluebeard” has many variations, but the core story is that of a young woman who marries a wealthy and powerful widower. But blended with this central story are folkloric elements reminiscent of one of the most disturbing fairy tales, in my opinion: Bluebeard. I can’t really discuss the main story at the heart of this retelling without spoiling it (although, if you’re cleverer than I am, you may pick up on it much sooner than I did). As the chapters are interspersed with increasingly sinister excerpts from the agreement between residents and the Arcadia Gardens Home Owners Association, it quickly becomes clear that there is some serious trouble in this paradise.Ĭat Valente’s writing always has an ethereal, fairy-tale quality to it that is well-suited to plots that borrow quite heavily from folklore.

How did someone else’s hair get inside her house? Inside her vanity? And whose hair could it possibly be? Sophia runs her errands and makes house calls with her neighbors, but all the while she can’t help wondering about the lock of hair…. But Sophia’s blissful ignorance is shattered one morning when she opens a drawer in her vanity to reveal an unfamiliar hairbrush and a lock of another woman’s hair. She never even dreams of going into the locked basement that her husband has explicitly forbidden her from entering. She wakes up every morning thinking about how much she loves her husband and the house he built her, with its extravagantly large bed and furniture. Sophia is living a perfect life with the perfect husband in their perfect little suburban community known as Arcadia Gardens. Comfort Me with Apples, which came out just last week, is a bite-size horror novella that packs quite a punch for its small size. But her latest book takes quite a different approach, obscuring exactly which story it is retelling until the very end. Paula Cappa on Folk Horror in LiteratureĬatheryn Valente is known for drawing on fairy tales and retelling classic stories, such as in her Russian folklore-inspired novel Deathless.TheGothicLibrarian on Folk Horror in Literature.victoriagrimalkin on Folk Horror in Literature.Review of FINNA and DEFEKT-Retail Terror.The Quiet Stillness of Empty Houses Review.

Comfort Me with Apples by Catherynne M. Valente