Evil in the Family, or Crazy guy sends girl he loves lookalike back in time over and over again
The Gothic Novel. Someone on the V.C. Andrews message board recommended for reading old gothic romances, the mother of VCA novels. Other than Victoria Holt, I had no idea these books existed other than the ones that were published around the turn of the century. I combed one of my local used bookstores and found ONE hiding in the horror section. She said they were hard to find but I didn’t think they were THAT hard. I was wrong. :p And let me add that I don’t understand the way the romance sections are set up at all. I don’t read romances so I’ve never braved these sections before. They have historical romance, paranormal romance, Silhouettes, and Regencies. These I understand. But then they have three unlabeled romance sections that all go from A-Z by author. Three. I don’t get it.
So onto the book. Evil in the Family by Grace Corren. The cover is typically gothic, with the heroine wearing that deer-in-the-headlights expression. I do adore the lovely touch of the red moon behind the house. And how they advertise the non-glare paper. ^_^ We have the lovely Dana Gentry, who’s a black-haired blue-eyed beauty. He parents and brother died in a car accident three weeks earlier leaving her orphaned at the age of nineteen. With no one else to turn to she goes to her mother’s sister, Gladys, her only living relative, who also been estranged from her family for thirty years. Her mother filled her head with happy tales of five children growing up in a loving home so when she gets there she’s very disappointed by the dilapidated old house that meets her.
The housekeeper person thing , Angela, isn’t the least bit pleasant, but brings her up to meet her elderly aunt once she gets the okay. Glady’s suffers from arthritis and hasn’t left the second floor of her home in ten years. She claims she gives her Dana’s mother’s room. Gladys goes to lay down and Angela is unpleasant some more so Dana heads outside and meets two very strange guys who live in the rooming house next door and work at the rubber plant in town named Ted and Johnny. Ted’s very flirty and she likes him. Dana looks around the house a little and at pictures, reminiscing on old stories her mom used to tell her. Gladys was the oldest, the second oldest was named Dana whom the current Dana was named after (because it’s a family tradition to have a Dana in every generation). Then there was Martha, who died of cancer before Dana was born. Then Tom, who died in World War II who Dana‘s brother was named for. Then Loranne, Dana’s mother. Is her name supposed to be like Lorraine, or Lor Anne? Conveniently enough, Dana looks just like the Dana she was named after, except in the pictures that Dana had her hair shortly cropped. Guess who’s who on the cover. She goes to bed early.
The next morning she wakes up very early and goes downstairs to make herself some breakfast. She thinks she hears a door shut before she gets to the kitchen and investigates the back porch. She doesn’t see anyone so she locks the door behind her. When she comes back in Angela attacks her, screaming she won’t let Dana take what’s rightfully hers. Angela’s fucking crazy. Angela’s pulled off Dana by some guy. Angela starts crying hysterically and the guy comforts her. He takes a good look at Dana and asks “Dana?” Then he seems to realize it’s Gladys’s niece and takes Angela from the room. Later that day Dana asks her aunt what Angela’s husband’s name is. Gladys tells her Ronald Richard Roland. Arr Arr. But she hasn’t seen him in years. Dana wonders what he was doing in the house.
She makes plans with Ted to go out with him and Johnny and Johnny’s girlfriend who played such a minor role I can’t recall her name and don’t feel like looking for it. After they go to work she goes exploring the grounds. She searches the garage and the basement. While in the basement she gets whacked in the face and goes unconscious.
When she wakes up she’s in the same room she’s staying in but things are different. Everything’s newer. When she glances at her reflection in the mirror she sees her hair is cropped short and thinks someone must’ve cut her hair after they hit her. Someone bangs on her door telling her to get up. She looks outside and sees everything a lot newer, different. The closet holds clothes that are completely out of fashion and finds an unused diary with To Dana on the front. She gets dressed and goes downstairs, a little freaked out and sees her mother and mother’s family from forty years earlier. She realizes she’s somehow in the body of her Aunt Dana. (I want to know why if her aunt told her she was put in her mother’s old room and it turns out it was Dana’s. She even tells her how it was the nursery and that her mother stayed in it since she was the youngest.) Her father-grandfather-person (it’s all very confusing so for this part I’ll be referring to family members from Aunt Dana’s pov) questions her about the sensibility of taking a job. She tries to talk to Gladys but finds her to be very hostile towards her. The father feels she’s tearing the family apart and he just doesn’t know what to do about her anymore. Ever her mother’s cold to her. She gets a call from Ron pretending to be her future boss and he asks he to meet with him at a diner. She lies to her family and goes. They banter back and forth and Glady’s storms up to them and does the hole jealous girlfriend thing. Dana seems to be having second thoughts of how she just stole Gladys’s boyfriend and runs after and promptly gets hit by a truck.
Dana wakes up back in her own body with Gladys sitting beside her, telling her she gave her a scare. She claims Dana hit he head on a low beam. Dana still thinks she was hit but doesn’t pursue it further. She falls back to sleep. Hours later she awakens and heads downstairs. She asks Angela for some toast and the other woman is quick to tell he she shouldn’t be up but she gets it anyway. Angela goes upstairs and comes back down, telling Dana Gladys wants to see her. The two of the talk but are interrupted by the doorbell being rung. It’s Ted and asks for Dana, but Angela tells him she’s not there. Dana quickly goes down and informs Ted that yes she is there and doesn’t bother to find out why Angela would lie. They decide to keep their plans for going out and she goes back up to her aunt.
She goes on her date, has fun, comes back. When she goes upstairs to change she finds the diary in the dresser. Suddenly she remembers the weird dream where she was her aunt. Dana’s not sure what to think but she’s sure someone’s trying to drive her crazy. There’s a creepy knock at her door and it turns out to be Gladys. Dana hides the diary and tells her a little about her date and asks Gladys about her own love life. Gladys admits there was a man she loved very much but things didn’t work out. Dana finally pops the question what happened between her and her mother. Gladys tells her it was a house of sadness, not all of happiness like her mother told her. She then asks Dana if her mother ever told her why she ran away. This is news to Dana who asks Gladys to explain, but the old lady won’t. She goes downstairs to get something to eat and finds food waiting for her. Thinking Angela set it out for her she eats it. Then she gets all paranoid and tries to leave. She runs into Angela and tells her she’s leaving, but Angela tells her oh no she’s not and she collapses.
She wakes up nice and sore as Dana Wilson and remembers being hit by the truck. She only has a few scratches and bruises, nothing serious. She tries to contact Ron by calling the hotel he’s at but the manager person won’t go get him. She asks her mother about Gladys and her mother crossly tells her Gladys is staying with a friend. Her father pulls her aside to talk and yells at her about tearing the family apart. Gladys won’t come home unless she’s gone. He asks if she loves this boy Roland and asks if she’s going to marry him. She starts accusing him, asking him if he even knows what love is. He finally hits her. He’s extremely upset about how he can’t do anything right and leaves her be. She asks him if she can use the care and he tells her to just go ahead. I think he’s washed his hands of her.
She heads to Ron’s hotel. When she gets there the staff tells her not to go up but she goes anyway and finds him with a little blond forty year younger Angela. She starts yelling at him that she wasted her time stealing him from her sister. Angela cuts in on their fight, saying that Ron has to marry her. She’s pregnant with his child. Ron’s less that thrilled and Angela turns to Dana, telling her to get out of there. Dana laughs and tells her he’s all hers. While driving home her car was hit by a truck. This family really has no luck with trucks. Dana Gentry’s family were all killed by a truck hitting their car, too.
Dana wakes up back in her own time with Gladys at her side. Dana asks again why her mother ran away, saying she has a right to know. They had a fight over a guy Loranne was involved with. Loranne got so angry she just walked out of the house and never came back. They never wrote or anything. So even though she was sad about Loranne’s death, she was thrilled to get Dana’s letter. Dana thinks she’s sincere and second guesses her suspicions that Gladys is somehow behind all this weird time travel stuff. Dana falls back to sleep. Gladys rings for Angela but Angela doesn’t come. So goes downstairs for the first time in ten years.
Dana wakes up and is thrilled she’s still in 1973. She can’t find Gladys so she takes the opportunity to search the second floor. She finds Angela’s room and in it a bookshelf full of about 20 books about time travel and hypnotism and a ton of other psychobabble. She goes downstairs and outside intending to leave, but is accosted by Ronald Roland! Oh me oh my! As if he weren’t the obvious villain. He drags her back towards the house and sits her in a chair, binding her hands behind her back. Gladys has no idea what’s going on. I feel bad for the old lady. Dana calls him mad and he agrees with her, but adds that they’re all mad. Ron is fucking crazy, too. Him and Angela were right for each other, after all. He goes on, saying the only mistake he ever made was letting Dana Wilson slip through his fingers and he would bring her back through Dana. Grand scheme revealed!
He and Gladys banter and in the whole wonderful ness that is the villain’s monologue and Q&A session. Dana asks about his and Angela’s child. He explains Angela lied to him. She can’t have kids. She screams she never lied. It was a false pregnancy So Ole Ron uses hypnosis and sends her back in time and she the other Dana’s death once more. She realizes what Ron does not. While she can go back in time and relive things, she cannot change a thing. When she awakens she winks at her aunt and starts talking of the fire and where is she. Ron comforts her
At that moment Ted and Johnny burst in, saving the day! They have guns! While they’re untying Dana and Gladys Angela steals the gun. Ron tells her good job and asks for the gun, but she won’t give it to him. No, she shoots him instead! Murder is the true end all solution to your problems.
Epilogue. Dana stays with Gladys and continues going out with Ted. They told the police that Ron had the gun and Angela pulled it away from him, causing it to go off, so they wrote it off as an accident. Shouldn’t they have finger printed the gun and seen that Ole Ron had never touched it? Oh well. Weird book but interesting. Everything was just a little too neatly wrapped up for my tastes but I still liked it. I think I'll read another of these Gothic things when I can find one. ^_^