Water, water everywhere
If you like your psychological suspense stories awash in atmosphere, drenched in dread and soaked with sinisterness, Palace of the Drowned by Christine Mangan is for you. The setting is Venice in 1966, the site of a real-life historic flood in which water levels rose over six feet — a consequence of high tides combined with three days of heavy rain and a sirocco wind that wouldn't quit.
Electricity, phone and gas lines shut down, the first floors of residences were underwater, and the city was isolated from the outside world. In mystery fiction, this kind of extreme weather situation is what's known as “the dark and stormy night” gambit.
As she did in her 2018 bestselling debut novel, Tangerine, Mangan focuses her narrative on a slow-building, intense relationship between two women. Frankie (Frances) Croy is a middle-aged British writer who enjoyed a smashing debut years ago, but whose subsequent novels have never matched that early success. When this story opens, Frankie has retreated to a wealthy friend's vacant palazzo in Venice to lick her wounds and hunker down to work.
Frankie becomes convinced that a mysterious presence also inhabits the supposedly empty palazzo, which has a name that translates into English as “Palace of the Drowned.” One day, as she's walking near the Grand Canal, Frankie's uneasy solitude in the foreign city is broken when a hand reaches out of the crowd and grabs her wrist. That hand belongs to a woman, also British, who claims to be an acquaintance. Frankie is uncertain.
That woman, Gilly, is a budding writer who's well acquainted with both Frankie's work and Venice. In the ensuing weeks, Gilly drags a somewhat resentful, somewhat grateful Frankie through the city to cocktail parties and the opera.
The ingeniousness of Palace of the Drowned derives from Mangan's skill in stirring up doubt about everything and everyone. Was that meeting by the Grand Canal a trick of fate or did Gilly engineer the encounter? Is Frankie right to be suspicious or is she becoming a madwoman? And, is the palazzo really haunted or are Italian mice just noisy?
Mangan's narrative structure can sometimes feel waterlogged, a little too bogged down in its own clever ambiguities. But the pace picks up as the historic storm of 1966 gathers force. Mangan, who has a Ph.D. in English with a focus on Gothic literature, clearly revels in describing the claustrophobic terror of the storm.
In a melodramatic climax, tears, accusations and confessions fly free. So, too, do precious manuscript pages that sink beneath the rising waves of the canal that borders the palazzo.
Like so many other recent suspense stories, Palace of the Drowned turns out to be a tale about literary appropriation and the anxiety of authorship (see also Chris Power's A Lonely Man and Jean Hanff Korelitz's The Plot). But this is one damp creeper that will give readers renewed appreciation for the stability of dry land.