BLAZE OF GLORIA
Hideaway’s monster mom runs rampant in suburbia
It all began with Stephen King’s Misery.
“I usually forget what I was thinking about when starting a book,” Canadian novelist Nicole Lundrigan confesses. But not this time. Not with her harrowing new novel, Hideaway, about two youngsters and a doting mother who turns into a monster.
Lundrigan had already published six successful novels and was contemplating her seventh when one of her daughters began reading King’s 1987 shocker about a bestselling author who becomes prisoner of a celebrity-stalking obsessive named Annie Wilkes.
Mother and daughter started discussing the book, and at some point — almost casually — Lundrigan said, “Can you imagine what it would be like if Annie was your mom?”
That chance remark planted a seed. Lundrigan found herself confronted by another question. What if someone like Annie actually were a mom in a story?
“And that launched the character of Gloria for me,” Lundrigan says now.
And who is Gloria? Lundrigan thinks for a moment and then: “I actually think she’s the first character I’ve ever written that has not had a redeeming quality.”
Hideaway takes an unsettling look at what can really be happening behind the reassuring facade of suburban life. Gloria Janes, the novel’s dominant figure in more ways than one, may appear to the outside world as the quintessential suburban wife and mother — except she isn’t. Her controlling, narcissistic personality has sent her husband, Telly, fleeing and left Gloria in denial as she becomes convinced she can win him back and restore the “perfect” home of her fantasies. The primary victims of her obsession are the two-children — 13-year-old Rowan, who becomes a target of her hostilities after Telly leaves, and impressionable seven-year old Maisie, on whom Gloria dotes, seeing this child as the wish-fulfilment of her own delusions about herself.
“She wants everything to be a reflection of herself,” Lundrigan says. “In Gloria’s own mind, everything revolves around Gloria.”
Lundrigan took on a tricky challenge with this novel. All the events are seen through alternating perceptions of the two children — perceptions that at times may seem questionable and lacking in maturity but nonetheless reveal an unfolding horror story.
It wasn’t the first time she had employed this device — sections of her previous novel The Substitute are told through the eyes of a criminal psychopath — but with Hideaway, the creative stakes were especially daunting.
“You needed to be very clear about dialogue, perspective and what the child sees — and what the child misses,” she says. “It was also a very emotional experience, I found, to write from the perspectives of children in a very vulnerable situation.”
In the novel, Rowan runs away to find security in the kindness of strangers — in this instance a kindly homeless man named Carl. Back home, little Maisie becomes the often uncomprehending victim of a manipulative mother who remains obsessively convinced that she can win back her estranged husband — home cooking and sex are two of her pathetically chosen methods of enticement — to fulfil her delusional vision of domestic perfection.
“What if home is the most dangerous place to be?” That’s a tagline her publisher uses to market the book, so one asks whether Lundrigan is comfortable with it.
“I’m not uncomfortable with it,” she says from her Toronto home. “It has some of the elements of a psychological thriller, but for me, character comes first rather than plot. I think there’s always been difficulty putting my books in a particular genre or category. I don’t really think about it too much. I just kind of write what I write.”
Lundrigan was born in Ottawa and raised in Newfoundland and Labrador, the setting for her earliest novels. She holds degrees in science and anthropology from various Canadian universities. And even now, with seven novels to her credit, her writing success seems to astonish her.
“I didn’t study writing,” she says. “I always thought I’d grow up to be a scientist.”
It was only after her first daughter was born that she started taking stock of her future.
“I knew I could do research. I knew I could write an essay.” Her daughter’s arrival was a home birth, so Lundrigan decided to write about it.
“I sent it to a magazine, and they published it. I thought — OK, maybe I can write something else.”
She embarked on a freelance writing career that resulted in sales to outlets as varied as Reader’s Digest and Natural Family Living Magazine. This led to a momentous decision.
“I decided I was going to write a novel with actually no knowledge of how to write a novel.” Lundrigan says now, laughing at her temerity. “I was very naive, and just went and tried and ended up with a book.”
That book was 2003’s Unraveling Arva, the story of a young outport woman struggling to escape her past. Since that time, Lundrigan has moved from strength to strength. Her 2017 novel, The Substitute, a tense thriller about a troubled teacher caught up in the death of a student, received glowing reviews that compared her with such literary titans as Patricia Highsmith and Margaret Millar.
Lundrigan admits she’s a bit of a perfectionist — or as much as she can be, considering that she initially saw her writing career as a convenient occupation for a stay-at-home mother (she has three children), and even now does much of her work at the dining room table.
An interviewer once asked Lundrigan what makes a great story great. Her answer: “Love, authenticity and a bit of madness.”
Hideaway offers different kinds of love — on the one hand the closeness of the two children to each other, on the other the controlling, obsessional nature of Gloria’s love.
“I want my characters to seem like real people who could be next door — plus a little bit of madness, something that pulls you in to keep you reading.
“For me,” she says, “it’s always about the why — not necessarily what happens. Why does somebody do that? Why is this madness there? It’s exploring and discovering.”
You needed to be very clear about dialogue, perspective and what the child sees — and what the child misses.