Maggie Turned, Remembering (Housebound by Elizabeth Gentry)

One of my favorite things about Elizabeth Gentry’s deeply beautiful debut novel Housebound is its outright rejection of quirkiness, one of contemporary fiction’s most laughably esteemed virtues, in favor of the true, the blushful Hippocrene: real-deal, top-shelf weirdness–in the contemporary sense of the word, yes, but especially in its Old and Middle English senses. Housebound is a thrilling combination of bedtime story and nightmare, a serious and sophisticated work of high Modernism to be read with a flashlight under the covers past your bedtime. But be warned: No matter how, where, or when you read it, it will burrow so deeply into your psyche that the line between its scenes and your own memories may begin to blur.

Elizabeth Gentry, Housebound. Published by Lake Forest College Press (2013). 160 pages.