Dreams of Rescue
A Novel
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
"I have spent the winter at my summer place," begins the narrator of this startlingly original literary chiller. Juliana Durrell Smythe, known for her "female in jeopardy" performances on film, fears her roles are proving prophetic. As an actress, she is accustomed to rescue. In movies, "Having known the comfort of muscled arms, I still expect, without reason, to be carried to safety and, ultimately, to be loved." But confined to her Victorian lake house, Juliana discovers the discrepancies between film and actual jeopardy. "The police have not turned out to be kindly, potential lovers...." She must walk the fault line of fiction and confront the mysterious and violent end of her marriage. An atmosphere of danger descends with the snow. The men who enter Juliana's life seem suspect; her predicament shadowed by the distress of her housecleaner. How much did she see? How much does she know?
Haunted by her past roles and the history of her romantic home, built for a wedding in 1899, Juliana's marital mystery becomes entwined with that of the original Victorian bride's. To survive, she is compelled to connect a nineteenth-century disappearance to the contemporary despair of the lakeside resort. In a snowscape of dazzling beauty, Juliana must enact the role that will save or cost her own life.
Plumbing the secrets of two centuries, Cunningham has written a hypnotic novel that will transport the reader into a brilliantly evoked world. With its hard-chiseled realities and incandescent images, Dreams of Rescue is a new take on a classic form, that shatters convention and will entrance readers long after its stunning finale.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Best known for Sleeping Arrangements, her memoir of growing up in New York, novelist Cunningham (Beautiful Bodies) offers a literate and thoroughly entertaining take on the female-in-jeopardy ("FemJep") genre of film and fiction, sending up its familiar conventions while crafting a truly gripping suspense novel. Actress Juliana finds seclusion at Casi di Rosas, her Adirondack hideaway, while awaiting a hearing on her case against her abusive husband, Matt. Having made a career of playing movie victims, Juliana thinks about casting, costumes and camera work in the courtroom and dreams of a handsome leading man coming to her rescue. Fiction and reality collide when a vacuum cleaner salesman stalks her, she gets disturbing crank phone calls and the maid reveals she knows more about all this than she had previously admitted. At the same time, Juliana is haunted by memories of her horrific life with Matt, such as the Thanksgiving at which he threw a turkey at her and killed their cat. It doesn't help matters that her neighbor across the lake is a full-time writer and part-time voyeur or that her court-appointed psychologist thinks she's crazy. Observing the action as if she were viewing one of her own movies, Juliana finds it easier to explain her husband's actions than her own. Why does she forget to bring her best piece of evidence to court? Why does she dress provocatively for an important court appearance? Why is she obsessed with a series of mysterious Victorian deaths, including that of the bride who once occupied her own house? And how will she reach a happy ending if there's no hero to rescue her? Cunningham answers all these questions with energy and wit, simultaneously mocking and bringing new life to FemJepfiction. She skillfully twists its familiar conventions to create her best novel to date.
