This novel, too, heaves with allusions to other books and other authors - a little Patricia Highsmith here, a little Virginia Woolf there, glimpses of Shirley Jackson’s “The Haunting of Hill House” someplace else.įrankie is anxious, skittish, easily spooked, prone to flights of fancy. Mangan writes with lush, evocative, busy prose. “Palace of the Drowned,” which takes its name from the palazzo where Frankie is attempting a kind of rest cure, is the follow-up to Mangan’s atmospheric debut, “ Tangerine.” Like its predecessor, the book is set in an exotic place in an earlier time - here, Venice in 1966, a year of torrential rain and historic flooding - and features a fraught relationship between two women that can sometimes stress the reader out.
She’s like the innocent-looking child in a Gothic novel who feigns ignorance even as the new governess finds her favorite dress hacked to bits and a decapitated doll left in her bed. She’s an agent of destabilization and derangement. In the movie, Eve’s endgame is straightforward - steal her idol’s man and take her job - but here Gilly has a more insidious agenda. Like everything she says, it’s not quite what it seems. “I knew it was you!” she exclaims when she runs into the book’s heroine, Frankie, on a Venice street.
Gilly, the young woman who emerges as the villain of sorts in Christine Mangan’s “Palace of the Drowned,” materializes from nowhere like Eve Harrington in “ All About Eve,” all bashful smiles and disingenuous sycophancy. PALACE OF THE DROWNED By Christine Mangan
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