The footmen have to fold the body to get it into the chair. Lydia Fairfax-Waugh died that morning, and her daughter has sent notes to every photography studio between Hampstead and Kilburn, because there are so few pictures of her mother and she is terrified of forgetting the face. The photographer arranges the widower behind the chair, one hand on the dead woman’s shoulder, and the daughter beside her. Then he hesitates over the dead woman’s sister, standing in her blacks, and asks whether he should take the whole family. Nobody can answer him. During the long exposure Odette becomes convinced that if she leaned round and looked, her mother would be alive, so she keeps her eyes on the wallpaper. Rottenheart by Kat Dunn begins with a portrait of a family in which no one can look at what is in front of them, and that refusal turns out to be the whole novel.
Cecilia Lives in the Walls
The daughter is the heroine, but the more original creation is the girl across the road. Cecilia Moore has loved Odette since she was twelve, when she first saw her through a window, dressed in velvet with a tin sword for one of Lydia’s paintings. She is the novel’s watcher. At Herne House, the family’s crumbling summer manor in Suffolk, she knows a loose panel in the corridor that opens onto the old servants’ passages, closed up for years and full of spiders and stagnant water, and she moves through them like a mouse, peering into bedrooms through cracks in the panelling.
Dunn gives Cecilia a voice of startling self-erasure. She thinks of herself as the blank space around the object in a drawing, the shape that lets the real thing exist, and her love for Odette is half devotion and half disappearance. Her own mother, Penelope, a former actress who still speaks in stage dialogue, pinches and bullies her into acting as a spy on the grieving household. The chapters told from her side are the best in Rottenheart by Kat Dunn: quieter than Odette’s, funnier, and full of small cowardices that feel painfully real.
What makes her more than a sidekick is that she has her own secret to keep. On the night of the death she sees something through a lit window that changes the shape of both households, and her mother orders her to say nothing to Odette. The novel’s long middle is built on that silence. Cecilia tells herself she is protecting the girl she loves, then that she is protecting the roof over her own family’s head, and the reader watches the two loyalties grind against each other. The arrangement gives Rottenheart by Kat Dunn a second suspense line that has nothing to do with ghosts and is, at times, the tenser of the two.
Kat Dunn Lets the Paintings Haunt First
Long before there is a ghost, the dead woman’s art is already arranging the living. Lydia painted the two girls as Pre-Raphaelite heroines, and the stories she chose were always the doomed ones. In one summer sitting she poses Cecilia as the drowned Elaine of Astolat in a half-filled bath of cold water, with Odette kneeling over her in borrowed chain mail as a guilt-stricken Lancelot. It is a beautiful scene and a sinister one, because the book keeps returning to it, and the image of a girl lying still in water becomes a threat that hangs over every later chapter.
The setting is drawn with the same care. The rituals of the house of mourning, the shrouds sewn by hand, the funeral breakfast and the custom of post-mortem photography are rendered with a historian’s precision and none of the dust. The two young women are lovers from the first chapter, and Rottenheart by Kat Dunn treats that as ordinary inside its own walls, frank about desire and alert to the danger of discovery outside them.
Then Lydia comes back. Odette alone sees her: a figure in the shroud she embroidered herself, a lock of hair missing where the scissors shook, insisting she was murdered and naming the person responsible. Dunn keeps the question open for a long time. A medium’s back room in Camden begins as obvious fraud, with a foot nudging the table and a childish spirit voice, and then tips into something that frightens even the medium. Cecilia, beside her, feels nothing at all. Whether Odette is haunted or simply broken by grief is the engine of the middle chapters, and the debt to Shakespeare is plain enough that readers will guess the outline of what follows, if not its particulars.
The letters between the two universities are a small, piercing interlude. Cecilia writes from Somerville about punting invitations and dramatic readings; Odette writes from Newnham less and less, until the replies become scraps, a crossed-out line, a page with no greeting at all. Few things in Rottenheart by Kat Dunn are as frightening as that silence on the page.
Where Kat Dunn Leaves the Doors Ajar
The reservations are real, and the most damaging is mechanical. For a novel about secrets, a striking amount of information arrives because somebody happens to be standing on a stair, behind a screen or inside a wall at the right moment. Cecilia’s passages make the first few overheard conversations feel earned. By the later chapters, the device has become a crutch, and Rottenheart by Kat Dunn knows it, since Cecilia herself remarks on how often she catches people talking.
The prose has a related problem of excess. At emotional peaks the similes stack three or four to a paragraph, and the rhetorical questions pile up until they blur. A good editor could have cut a fifth of the book without losing a single image that matters.
The ending is the most divisive part. The emotional resolution, which belongs to the two young women, lands with real force. The practical one does not. A character the plot has used and discarded is left in serious trouble abroad, and the novel spends barely a sentence on it. Others simply walk out of the story. Readers who need consequences for the living as well as peace for the dead will close the book unsatisfied.
What It Leaves Behind
What remains is a book about the way mothers live on inside daughters, told through two families who make very different kinds of mess of it. Grief, suicide, violent death, parental cruelty and confinement all figure along the way, some of them handled graphically, and the sex between the two heroines is warm and occasionally explicit. Rottenheart by Kat Dunn is an uneven novel with a genuinely unsettling heart, and that heart belongs to Cecilia.
Readers who want Dunn’s earlier, more contained gothic should go back to Hungerstone by Kat Dunn, her Peak District reworking of a classic vampire tale. House of Splinters by Laura Purcell shares its interest in a decaying house where the boundary between haunting and breakdown will not hold, and Sarah Waters’s Affinity remains the touchstone for a Victorian love between women entangled with spirits, mediums and the dark.
In that first photograph, Odette keeps her eyes fixed on the wallpaper. It takes her the length of the novel to turn round and look.