A few days ago, DarkWinter Press published London Gothic by Ed Seaward. It is a haunting, ‘Southern Ontario gothic’ tale set in 1970s/80s London, Ontario. To celebrate the release, we have a short excerpt to share with our readers. Here’s the synopsis:
In 1975, John Caine and his nineteen-year-old son Ricky bury a woman near a clump of trees in an open field on the rural outskirts of London, Ontario. In 1984, seventeen-year-old Bethany Caine is haunted by the disappearance of her mother nine years previous. Her father and brother insist Thelma Caine abandoned them one night, evidenced by her brief goodbye note. Having already escaped the house dominated by her brutish father to live with her lover, university student Angela, Bethany presses much older brother Ricky to reveal what actually happened to their mother.
Structured along alternating timelines, with chapters exploring the Caine family in the 1970s interspersed with chapters set around the Victoria Day long weekend in 1984, London Gothic unfolds a story of violence and incest as those who truly love and support Bethany attempt to uncover the mystery of Thelma Caine’s disappearance.
And now, here’s the excerpt…
*
1975
The white pebble bounced soft off the bridge of her nose and settled in the middle of her forehead. He stopped shovelling and went still. The tiny stone glinted in the moonlight and in the face of everything that had happened it nearly made him laugh knowing how angry she would be at him as if he’d placed it on her forehead as some joke. He gripped the shovel tighter but did not move to scoop more dirt. Any sense of laughter vanished and his knees weakened and he became so lightheaded that he shoved the tip of the spade hard in the pile of dirt to steady himself.
“Give me that if you can’t do it.”
The tone of his father’s voice matter-of-fact, void of anger or contempt, the man who had done all the digging without complaint, without asking for assistance. Only after they’d rolled her out of the brown and orange bedspread and into the grave had he handed Ricky the shovel.
“I’m okay.”
He shovelled up the dirt and tossed it into the hole and continued without stopping, always careful to avoid her face, not wanting to disturb the white pebble that adorned her like a jewel. The bright moon lighted his work. Dirt covered her body, filled the hole around her head, and when at last he tossed a shovel full onto her face it landed lightly and he thought it covered the pebble in such a way to keep it in place.
When he finished, the nineteen-year-old stepped out of the way and his father scattered rocks with his hands and his feet and stomped back and forth and then took the shovel from Ricky’s hands and dug two small holes and planted shrubs he’d dug up from inside the wooded area on the far side of the gravel road when they’d first arrived. John Caine kicked more dirt and more rocks and stomped his heavy work boots back and forth around the shrubs to complete the job as thoroughly as he completed any job he’d ever started. Ricky waited until his father took the shovel and bedspread to the trunk of mom’s baby blue Chevy coupe and then he stepped to the tree at the head of the grave and fell to his knees and withdrew his hunting knife from his belt. He bent tall weeds to one side and began to etch a rough and modest cross.
“What the hell are you doing?”
He stopped. He stared up, not at his father but at the moon. He didn’t argue or explain or justify. Ricky climbed to his feet and slid the knife into his belt with the knowledge that in the next day or two he’d come back in darkness alone and complete the carving of a cross. Quiet defiance. Open defiance impossible.
*
Edward Seaward’s London Gothic is out now, published by DarkWinter Press.
