BENEATH THE POET'S HOUSE

The spirits of Edgar Allan Poe and Sarah Helen Whitman, the transcendentalist poet who almost became his wife, haunt this modern-day tale of a new widow seeking only to forget her past.

Even after she moves from New Jersey to Rhode Island, cozy mystery novelist Saoirse White is still tormented by the voice of her husband, attorney Jonathan White, who suffered a fatal heart attack nine months ago. She doesn’t want to talk about his last days; she doesn’t want his best friend, Aidan Vesper, to show her his final text; she doesn’t want to spend a minute longer than she has to in the company of his family. Instead, she moves back to Providence, where she and Jonathan first met as students at Brown, resolved to put the past behind her. No such luck. As local spiritualists Lucretia, Mia, and Roberto excitedly inform her, the house at 88 Benefit Street that she’s rented is the old Whitman House, where Sarah Helen Whitman lived and wrote 175 years ago. Overcoming a terror of new experiences nearly equal to her revulsion at the past, she allows her new acquaintances to draw her into a séance in what she considers her new home, and they consider holy ground. But the person who draws her out most dramatically is Emmit Powell, a Pulitzer Prize­–winning novelist who teaches at Brown. For whatever reason, he’s magnetically drawn to Saoirse and won’t take no for an answer. After the briefest of intervals, the fragile Saoirse’s no longer inclined to say no, and their relationship rapidly spirals from neo-gothic into high (or low) gothic territory.

A trembling translation of 19th-century female horror tropes to a new era that may not be all that new.