Review by Mack Hassler
“ … upon this rock I will build my Church…. I will give you the keys to the Kingdom of heaven. Wharever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven and whatever you loose on on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”
Matthew 16: 17-19
The tradition of the Gothic Novel evolved at the end of the Enlightenment when readers yearned for the lost mysteries of Peter and the solid rock of the keys of the kingdom so they imported haughted and locked up castles from dark Germany in order to prove again God’s power in the “keys of the kingdom” and what they hoped could be unlocked. As is so often the case in religion and in literature, these mysteries are linked with the mysteries of sexuality whether the results are more strength for the Church, the linkage does make a good story. Rhoads here remembers the dark forests of the UP where she was raised.
What I find fascinating about Haggard House and this story are two very distinct and different mysteries that one needs to find the key in order to unlock. The more interesting and second mystery is the book itself and the author Rhoads herself. The title itself appears after a year on the internet platform serialized on a site called Substack from July 2024 till now. I think this is a great marketing move. Charles Dickens was the master of putting out his material in short pieces and then combing into his books, but for this review he is not as religious and even creepy as Rhoads. Further, both this serialized site and Rhoads herself have been located far from the fictional location of Haggard House itself which I set well in the Germanic dark of the UP forest at winter. Rhoads lives now in sunny Southern California. Her book publisher is in Irvine near the coast between Long Beach and San Diego. One of my all time favorite novels of time travel in science fiction is by Gregory Benford, who is a physics professor at Irvine one of the state universities of California. Benford’s great novel Timescape {1980). The Rhoads work has to be memory and imagination
There is,also, the scholarly question that Rhoads knows a lot about the Gothic tradition of her text. This dates back to The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole. He was the son of the great Prime Minister of England Robert Walpole and so had a large fortune. Not interested at all in politics, he built a modern version of an old Goth Castle on his property upriver on The Thames from London and continually added more “faux” chambers to it (locked and mysterious) to represent his imaginative Otranto. I suggest that in her own way Rhoads is doing the same thing in serializing her mysterious story far from its dark location in the UP.
Haggard House is narrated by Adam (read God’s first human creation in the Garden) as he interacts with his mysterious schoolgirl friend Penny (maybe read Eve). Buy the book even if you have watched the serialized version}. Unlock more of these mysteries and suggestions on God’s creation, even some of the religious cultishness you will find. Even with those extremes in thought, I think you will discover it is a populated cosmos with many houses. Jesus says in the epigraph above, “I go to prepare one for you.” This is where we, also, may find for each of us readers the keys to our own personal problems and mysterious opportunities. This is the job that the Gothic genre is designed to do. Rhoads does it well and adds some of her own mysteries to unlock.
Haggard House, by Elisabeth Rhoads, cover art Lover’s Eyes, c. 1840 The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC (Bodger Book, Irvine CA, 2025), 373 pages, pbk, n.p.
