Be Buried in the Rain (1985)

 


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When med student Julie Newcomb is summoned to the crumbling family estate to tend her malicious, dying grandmother, all she expects is an unpleasant trip down memory lane. But Maidenwood, she finds, has recently made the news with the gruesome discovery of a skeleton on the grounds. With her cousin Matt desperately trying to make political capital out of it, an archaeological team working nearby headed by the man who broke her heart, and the returning memories of her childhood, she finds it harder than she expected. And anyway, who was the mysterious woman discovered, with her dead baby cradled in her arms? Is it in fact, as some claim, the fabled Lady Jocelyn, a seventeenth century figure of romance come to live in the New World? Or is it someone more recent...someone a little closer to home...?

One of my favorite things about MPM's haunted house novels is that they're ardently anti-upper class. If the original home owners still live, they're usually snobs, destroyed by their own pride, victims of their own cruelty. But usually, to be sympathetic, our heroes are middle class intellectuals who've won the lottery, or earned their money, newly moved in and trying to solve the lingering issues of those former owners so they can continue living their lives in their beautiful new colonial home, thank you very much. Be Buried in the Rain is no different, despite Julie's connections to the aristocratic Carrs. Her desires and priorities are wildly different from terrifying Martha's, and all she wants is to escape the Carr legacy of pride and lies.

Buried is a subtle ghost story, distant from Ammie and Walker, with only the end gently touching on the supernatural. Although the book itself is absolutely rife with summer spookiness, as thick fog rolls in and mysterious skeletons are buried, which makes it good for a few chills.

Really, the overarching theme is justice, as the poem from which the book borrows it's title implies ("Justice Denied in Massachusetts" by Edna St .Vincent Millay), and as Julie so neatly sums up herself at the end.

I would also like to point out this is one of MPM's more diverse books, with several black characters--Shirley Jackson in particular is friend and mentor to Julie. I appreciate the effort MPM puts in here into refusing to let a story centered around Virginian life and history be entirely white. There's a long way to go yet, but it's something.

And as for the romance...well, Alan Petranek is the usual archaeologist love interest, loud and overbearing and obsessed with his work, but with that streak of gentleness and goodness that make him a true MPM hero. 

Rating: ****

*Keep an eye out for Elvis, the signature pet of MPM's work!

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