All right, welcome back, everybody, Welcome back to the book Graveyard.

We're doing our Guide to Gothics, the Paperback Graveyard Guide to Gothicside to Gothics.

I love that.

Yeah, we haven't a we haven't officially decided on the name.

But yeah, so for usual here we got my man Eric from the Paperback Warrior, Gothic expert.

I don't know about expert, but I'm here.

So in the Guide to Gothics, we are kind of discovering, discovering, uh learning about Gothics, making notes, sharing it with the.

World studying Gothics.

Yeah, most definitely.

Yeah, I think it's a I think it's a mysterious genre for a lot of readers.

Paperback lectors are kind of drawn in by the covers, but you never you don't really hear a lot of people that that read the Gothics and discuss them.

It's not, you know, something that's really uh grasp the paperback community other than just the covers alone.

But I think there's a lot of mystery there with the with the genre itself, whether they're straight up romance books that only uh you know, certain individuals read like the Golden Girls, are are there actually, uh, you know, crime nor are if they're thriller, if they're crime fiction, and the general consistence a lot of times is that they're horror novels, which is, you know, you've probably realized at this point in reading them that that's not really the case.

Yeah, there's there's hints.

Yeah, there's hints of the supernatural, but there's never there's hardly ever an actual horror core to the story.

It's it's it's it hints at it, but it never actually comes to fruition.

Right, I mean there's horror in the sense that there is real world horror like a crime or yes, murder, murder.

Right, Yeah, there's never any like, you know, apparition or something like that.

There's never a haunting, even though it's teased through three fourths of the book.

There's never a haunting or a ghost.

Spoiler alert everybody.

Yes, Rare.

I have seen it a couple of times where they leave it at the end where they just kind of leave it open to interpretational whether there was a haunting or not.

I just read one recently that was that way, and it's interesting to do it that way because then you kind of you can kind of guess and and sort of let your imagination run wild at the end.

So but mist of the time you can kind of figure out this isn't this isn't supernatural.

Yeah, yeah, I haven't.

I haven't read one yet that it has been supernatural.

But I'm I'm hoping someday.

I hope, Yeah, I hope it does.

It does happen.

Yeah, I wrote up this little little thing that of what I think a gothic novel is that I wanted to read off and uh so I I I say a gothic suspense slash romance story because they're called both.

Either a Gothic romance or Gothic suspense is oftentimes a mystery, but instead of the narrative being from the perspective of a character solving the crime after the fact, the Gothic is from the perspective of the would be murder victim trying to avoid their death.

Yes, yeah, exactly, that's right.

So, yeah, there's usually the conspiracy to get them out of the way, and the mystery of a Gothic is figuring out who is actually after them, who's true, who's false, and figuring out before it's too late and it becomes a hard boiled crime novel.

Yes, right, that's exactly right.

Yeah, to see how it develops.

So yeah, I mean it is kind of hard to sum up what exactly is a gothic So for you viewers out there wondering about this wonderful genre, me and Eric have come up with this list here.

We're gonna call it the Gothic litmus Test.

Yes, so it just has themes that we're gonna check off.

We're gonna add them up, and we're gonna see just how gothic each one of these books is.

Yeah, yeah, great idea.

Yeah, I love it.

So we will we will do that after our after our review.

And what are we what are we reviewing today?

We are we are reviewing Decoy in Diamonds.

There it is and all its beauty.

You've got the uh, the vulnerable beauty on the cover there screaming or alarmed.

Uh, she's afraid of something that's off page.

We don't know what that is.

It's it's got gothic up at the top, on the top corner there receive Dell.

It says gothic.

This was originally published in nineteen seventy two in paperback by by Dell, but it was originally published in nineteen seventy one by Pott him as a hardcover with no indication that it was a gothic, no indication at all that it was a gothic.

The author is Natalie Gates.

That you want me to kind of go into her absolutely cool.

Cool, So this isn't the first diamond that she's been around, the decoy and diamonds.

Natalie Gates, her father was the first owner of the Cincinnati Reds.

That is amazing.

Do you know the Cincinnati Reds are the first official Major League Baseball team?

I think I did know that, yeah, because in fact, I think he owned the Cincinnati Reds before eighteen I think it was like before eighteen ninety who was like eighteen eighties, I think, wow, Yeah, he bought the Cincinnati Reds, who was their first owner.

He had started out in the something called I think the American Association, which was a precursor to Major League Baseball.

They had like sixteen teams, and he started in Indianapolis with an Indianapolis team, but he somehow migrated over to Ohio and then buying the Reds and then by I think eighteen ninety five like that, around the turn of the century.

He bought the New York Giants anyway, so he was around, you know, baseball's whole life.

She was born in eighteen ninety five.

She died at the age of eighty four in nineteen eighty.

She had no children.

She only wrote two books.

She wrote this one, but her first book was a nineteen sixty seven hardcover titled Hush Hush Johnson, And it's a spy novel about this woman who works at a defense contractor plant and she ends up getting swayed by this welfare this guy who works for the Department of Welfare, and it turns out he's a Russian spy.

Imagine that, a Russian spy getting in the door with a defense contractor through a through a beautiful woman.

So she gets she gets duped by a Russian spy.

So that's what the book's about.

It got critically panned by The New York Times and Kirkus.

They both like they said it was awful.

This is an awful book.

And so she got panned by the critics for her nineteen sixty seven book, but she returned four years later with this decoy and Diamonds book to try it again.

This was her last book.

She only did two books, so that's it.

That's interesting that she started writing at the end of her life, right.

Yeah, it's like she.

I would imagine with the amount of wealth that they had, she probably toured the world.

She probably went on a few cruises, probably did a lot of safaris.

Yes, she saw, she saw the.

World, and she had no children to bogger down.

She was married, she had gotten married.

Looking at this up, she got married, like I think in nineteen twenty five, she married hotel owner Bennett Gates, which is how she got her name Gates.

She was originally Natalie Brush, but it ended in divorce, and then forty years later she got remarried and it was also a divorce.

So she probably dis liked her liked her money, and liked her freedom, and just liked to do her own thing.

And she probably got bored with life and decided she could write a book.

Whether she was any good or not, we'll find out.

But they got published, I mean got published, right, Yeah.

I'm sure it had nothing to do with all the money that she had.

Greasy.

Yeah, it's funny that you mentioned the New York Times, because when I was looking up Natalie Gates, and I couldn't find anything, by the way, good job that was in depth.

The only thing I found was this New York Times article called Criminals at Large, and it was about mail mystery writers.

It was published or published.

Is that considered published in the newspaper?

Yeah?

Yeah, published in the newspaper September nineteenth, nineteen seventy one.

And it's very short.

It's a very short review of this wonderful book.

And I'm just going to go ahead and read that.

So and this is an ongoing conversation sother you know, she's mentioned the previous book anyway, So you can try Decoyan Diamonds by Natalie Gates.

This too takes place on a cruise touching at South African ports.

This too as a shipboard romance in which the ugly duckling to swan motif is mauled about.

The plot has to do with a hot diamond passed off on a lady biology teacher.

Crude writing, crude plotting, forget about it.

Wow toasted they toasted her ass?

Wow?

Yeah, I know on the New York It see the New York Times, or Ifma've been The Indianapolis Star had said about her previous book.

The reviewer I was asking, is this supposed to be a comedy?

Is it supposed to be serious?

Because we can't really figure out what exactly she's trying to accomplish here.

And that's that's something a writer never wants to hear, right, like are you trying to be funny and potentially funny?

Or is this a formula that you're trying to follow?

Like what's going on with your with your shic?

But yeah, right, all right, well, and that leads us into declint diamonds.

Is everyone ready?

Are you excited?

Have I got you all hyped up for it?

I?

Sure hope?

So?

All right, so you know it starts with this prologue, and I remember reading the prologue and texting you and be like, man, I really like this the start of this book, I was, I was all in.

The prologue is about a diamond mine in it's South Africa.

It's about one of the miners finding this giant diamond and the company he worked for is the Blue Browned Mining Club Company Club.

And if you, if one of the workers finds a diamond, you can turn it into them and they'll give you, I think thirty percent of what it's worth to try to discourage FEBEs from stealing the diamond.

So if you find this giant diamond, they will they will give you money for it.

And then the guy who finds it has like a big family, and this man approaches him and basically says, I'll give you all all this money.

I'll give you way more if you help me get this diamond out of here, right, and the guy, yeah, So the miner has like this big family, is very poor, and he gambles, he gambles it all, throws, throws away his three thousand dollars thirty thousand.

It was a lot.

It was like thirty thousand dollars, right, and he wanted three hundred thousand instead.

Though.

Yeah, yeah, he was kind of like poaching for talent.

It was like trying to poach to get some talented miners that would wouldn't mind smuggling a few gems out.

And so yeah, he's a he's a recruiter.

Recruiter.

So then we have the intro.

Did you like the intro?

Were you in?

Were you all?

I was, yeah, I was really into this.

I was like, man, this is going to be great.

And and if you want a really good diamond smuggling book.

By the way, Ralph Hayes has an installment in the Stoner series, and it's the second book called I think it's called The Satan Stone.

I think I've got a review of it on Paperback Warrior if you just go to the tag for Stoner, it's in there.

But excellent diamond smuggling book.

The guy ends up smuggling out this huge diamond and he hides it under like a piece of machinery in this mine, and they hire Stoner.

And it's a prison by the way, it's a prison, it's a mining prison.

And the prisoner he gets this huge diamond out and he hides it under machinery, but he has no way of getting the diamond out of the prison.

So they end up hiring Stoner, who's a he's an international salvager.

They hire him to break into the prison and steal the steal the diamond from the machinery and then break out and and then they're gonna end up funneling the money back into the into the guy's family or whatever.

But great book.

And I was hoping based on what I read, I was like, well, this is gonna be an awesome diamond smuggling thing and it's just gonna be great.

There's gonna be a cruise ship involved.

But no, yeah, yeah, I wish we would have read that one instead.

Yes, all right, so that's the prologue.

So we get our first chapter where we meet our our protagonists.

Elsa.

Yeah she is.

She's an unaccompanied female biology professor from Brinmar College.

And by the way, two things on that the author, Natalie Gates, went to that college, and the other thing is her mother was named Elsa, So that's where she gets those names from.

Oh deep deep diving paperback warrior, never let you down.

I don't even know how you find it.

I looked it up and all I found was that New York Times article.

So you got the skills to pay the bills?

Man, I don't know about that one.

Okay.

So yeah, so's she was single her whole life.

She's twenty eight.

She's twenty eight year old virgin.

She's a virgin.

Yes, she was taking care of her invalid mother, who was a bedside tyrant, and the mom died and this cruise was a gift from her sister to celeb her freedom.

Yeah, so she is.

Not well versed in the world, in people, in relationships or anything.

Really right.

Yeah, she's she's pretty uh, she's pretty blank, she says.

She says, Heaven's to Betsy a lot.

Heavens Ste Betsy.

Yeah, so that I think that sums up her persona pretty well.

Heaven's ste Betsy.

Yeah, she's got a school marmish So she's on this cruise ship.

She gets there's signed seats.

I guess this is a real thing.

She gets assigned to a table where there's this good looking guy.

He's has movie star good looks and all the ladies won him.

She's she's luckily sitting next to him, not that he like notices her.

Really.

Yeah, and that man is named Clink, probably one of my favorite character names of all time.

Yeah, old Clink, Yeah Clink.

That's it's an old that sounds like an old school nickname.

You know.

That's his actual name.

Yeah, it's his actual name.

I just kept picturing like the the nineteen forties, like adventure romance movies with like the guy with the slicked hair and the mustache, the little sharp mustache.

You know, yeah, right Clink, Yeah, same.

The other characters.

There's the captain of the ship.

Who is he's got a nice looking blonde woman attached to him named Kathy Buchanan.

Yeah, she's very irritating.

Yes, she is very very irritating.

And yeah, and even in the book she has an obnoxious laugh.

It over they keep stating how she has a very obnoxious laugh you can hear coming from a mile away.

Yeah, there is.

There's like a gossiping passenger lady, which I thought was going to make a difference somewhere alone along along the story, where she was going to give some some intel and move the story forward.

But no, no, she's.

Just I thought she was going to make a difference in the story by falling overboard, but she never does.

She's with us the whole book.

The whole book.

And yeah, she's with us the whole book.

And not only that, but all she does is gossip about what we've already known about.

So it's it's brutal.

It's brutal people.

Yeah, and that's you know, when you're writing a book a book, or if you're writing for cinema, one of the no nos is never recap something that you've already seen or are read.

Don't ever have a character recap that.

Yeah, and and she does it throughout this.

Book, throughout throughout It's wonderful.

So on their so on their cruise ship, they go to their their tour.

They're going to tour the the Blue Ground Mining company.

While Elsa is walking through the crowd, one of the miners, all wrapped up, slip something into her hand.

Yeah, now, let me ask you.

Let me ask you this.

There you're out in public.

Let's say you're on this cruise ship.

You're you've landed in South Africa.

You're walking around, all these locals around you, and someone, someone shoves something into your hand and then scurries off.

What's the first thing you're gonna do.

I'm probably gonna open it up and see what it is, because I can decide if I want to carry this thing around with me, right?

Is it?

Is it a dead mouse wrapped right now?

Is it a bomb?

Is it a bomb?

Is it drugs?

Well that's the wrong answer, because the right answer is you put it in your purse.

You put it in your purse right away.

You just you forget about.

It, right Yeah?

Yeah, she puts it in a purse, and she carries it around with her for almost the entire day before she evenes, hey, I whyt want to check this.

Out, forgets about it.

Yeah, forgets about it, and then she gets back to her cabin and is like, oh, yeah, that guy, that stranger shoved that hard thing into my hand.

I wonder what that was.

So she owns it up and a lot of being about a boom there's a giant diamond.

And then about it being about a boom.

This is when I realized that this book is going to suck.

This.

I was like, this, this is this is not good.

We have not built a firm foundation for a plot here with this simple you know, shortcut.

But carry on, good eye, good eye.

Well we can keep up as many baseball analogies in honor of Natalie Gate's dad as possible.

Yes, yeah, so let's see.

So she okay, So she shows it to Clink.

She shows it to Clink, who is really excited about it, and it turns out that he he works for a company high to catch diamond smugglers.

And exactly, yeah, he just happens to be on this cruise ship and he happens to make conversation with her.

It's all it's all chance.

She just happens to show this guy right, good looking Clink.

Now Clink is a dick, right, what a jerk?

Yeah, he's yeah.

I mean it's a little callback here.

Why is she?

Why is she with him?

Yeah?

That was a question we had in our last review of The Shadow Guest by Hillary Wall.

We kept asking why is she with him?

And we're back to that again.

So, yeah, he's such a jerk to her and she's just she's she's kind of smitten, but he does give her bad vibes and she doesn't trust him at first.

Yes, correct, And I didn't either.

Yeah, I did.

I didn't either, And I think that's that's right.

There is probably the first.

No, that's probably the second Gothic trope.

I think the first one was her being picked up from her regular life and set into the different location.

Okay, so Clink wants her to give him the diamond to protect it, like because he shows her a card, right, He's like, I'm.

Yeah, to prove that he's an attorney out of New York.

He gives her a card that has his name on it and says that he's an attorney, and that's it, right.

Clink makes the quick connection that it was actually probably supposed to be Kathy, the obnoxious blonde woman who was supposed to get the diamond because they had the same dress on right for a very similar dress exactly, and then Clink also tells her to watch out.

Her life is in danger.

Right.

Yeah, So at this point we don't know if it's like, is he he's the guy who's helping to try to get smuggle this diamond out and she just stepped in it, she just stepped in a pile of poo, or if he's actually trying to help her.

Yeah, I had I had still some interest left at this point.

It was, it was, it was dwindling quite a bit, but I still had some interest to find out if this guy was legit or not.

And my my question was whether he was actually just part of the smuggling or if he was, you know, the head of the smuggling group.

I wasn't sure.

Yeah.

Yeah, and that's it.

That's it.

That's the conspiracy, that's the conspiracy, the Gothic conspiracy troupe.

And I was, I was right there with you.

And though I will say that it quickly falls apart and then what you see is what you get in this book.

Unfortunately.

Yeah, so there's not really much more to this plot to go over.

The two parties are just kind of trying to get the diamond, yes, in a cartoonish kind of way.

Yeah.

The the diamond ends up to kind of fast forward a little bit.

She ends up giving a diamond, She ends up losing the diamond in a crazy scene which we're going to talk about, and then she ends up recovering the diamond and then losing it again at a at a ballroom dance.

After she gives it to him, he loses it in a ballroom dance.

Yes, Clink loses.

They go looking yeah, yeah, and then they go looking for the diamond again, and and and they do this for one hundred and sixty pages, maybe one hundred fifty pages.

I'll just let's go to the next place and look for the diamond.

And when they look for the diamond, the readers are dragged through.

Let's look, let's look under this chair, Let's look under this chair leg.

Let's go to the swimming pool and check in the swimming robe, the bikini robe, or whatever you want to call it.

Is the cover up.

Yeah, let's go look here.

It's you're dragged through it.

But the most compelling scene which I think you're going to tell us about.

Was the safari that she's on in the African Jungles oh right by Lions.

Page forty seven.

It's when one of the one of the greatest scenes in any book.

So, so Elsa's on on this, uh the train for the Safari.

They're out trying to see some some wildlife.

Yeah, and unfortunately for Elsa, she ate some bad food back back on the ship back from look Down, I don't know, and she has diarrhea.

Right, she has to go to the bathroom right now.

Yeah, the night it's a nightmare scenario, to be honest, that I hear, like for real, Yeah, maybe it is a horror book.

So I when of those first starts happening, I'm cracking up, and I was like, I'm trying to think, have I ever read a story about a character that has to go to the bathroom, Like, like.

I never had.

I've never read that before in any book.

I've never There's never been a It's not like you're reading, you know, one of these private detective novels and the private detective says, wait a minute, I've got to go take a dump.

But in this case, she and and It is a nightmare scenario because she's on a safari.

So they're on like the little the little train, you know that's riding along the park and she she has to take a dump, and obviously they're not gonna just stop it so she can get off and take a dump.

And she's like, if you don't, if you know you have to do this or all, since I'm gonna make a mess of your seat, and Clink is saying, hey, she's for real.

She really has a bellybuster here, like we've got to we've got to let her unload, and and they're telling her, hey, if you get out here and take a dump, there's a possibility that you could be eaten by lions.

And she says, I'm gonna take a chance on it because I've got to go bad and she runs.

She runs off.

The safari, goes in and crouches behind a bush and another safari comes along and they spot her taking a dump and they're like, hey, this is another wild animal in the jungle.

It's a human crouching, you know, taking this massive, nasty, juicy dump.

And they're like they just say, pardon, pardon our dust here.

Let's just move on.

And she's, let's what But what she has is she has the diamond with her in her purse when she goes to take a dump.

And then when she's walking back to the Safari.

Lion, there's a lion.

There's a lion that growls at her, and she panics and drops her bag and yeah, runs back to the train.

So while she's back in the train, she tells Clink and Clink's about ready to run out there and get it.

But they look out the window and there's Kathy.

Kathy's already out there, starready got the bag and running back.

Yeah, lions be damned.

She doesn't care, right, I mean there's lions out there.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And she's like, I'm freaking Tarzan right now, and you know, I'm going after the Jewels of Opar right here by grabbing this diamond and getting back to the so far, which she does, and then they give the purse back to Elsa at the end, and Elsa of course decided it learns that there's no diamond in the purse, so that's why they go across the ship searching for the diamond.

And it's like it's a mad, mad, mad mad world where all these people are looking for the diamond.

But at this point, you know Kathy's involved because she's got the diamond.

You know she's involved in the smuggling.

I mean, there's not a lot of suspense here at all.

Now, there's not much mystery.

The only other mystery is who's involved with her, and then they pretty much they unveil that not too long after this incident.

Yeah, it's the monkey incident, which is also another wonderful, wonderful part of this because so they have to stay in town for their trip and Clink organizes it.

So Elsa and Kathy have to share a room, right, so they're like, they know that each other's after the diamond and one has it and one doesn't, but they're playing it straight, yes, pretending to be nice.

So one night Elsa drugs Kathy to search the room, doesn't find it.

And then the next day they're out seeing more animals and there's these monkeys and they're trying to take Kathy's picture or something, and a monkey jumps on her hair and starts attacking her, and it turns out that she wears a wig and the wig comes off and the monkey grab does the monkey grab the diamond?

Or does Elsa just see the diamond in the wig?

They don't really explain it.

Yeah, it's just a monkey takes the wig off and takes the diamond.

And yeah, all I know is I was reading it at night and I turned to my wife and I told her about it.

We both died laughing.

It's become like an inside joke now, and that's what the book is, like laughable, it's laughable it is.

There's something else that I wanted to point out that I noticed during the diarrhea scene is that this is one of the most basic written books, Like it's like a kid's book.

It's like an eighth grade education level.

It is.

And there's one line in this book that this kind of sums up how bad her writing is, and it was, Oh, here we go.

And I had actually told I told my wife this one.

She says, it was then that the cloud regurgitated the moon, making an easy target of Elsa.

Have you ever heard of an author writing the cloud regurgitated the moon?

No?

No, But I got to say that that's poetry compared to what I wrote down, which is like we got off the boat, it was raining, we saw elephants, Like that's that's pretty much what it was.

Yeah, there's a lion.

Look at those giraffes.

I'm scared.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, uh, you know, this is the book.

They search for the diamond on the cruise ship, and they finally unveil how the how the diamond is being smuggled, who's behind it on the cruise ship.

We get the the identity of the two or three people that are involved in this, and you get a romance between Elsa and Clink, which culminates in you know, like with any of these books, I've known I've known you for three to whole days.

Let's get married and live our lives together forever.

And that's what And uh yeah, I got I got some thoughts.

But what's your general thought of the book?

You know, just unless you have more to talk about in the details.

But there's not really many details.

Yeah, I think the only other the only other details are they tell the captain and he gets the some of the crew involved, and maybe some of the crew were involved.

I think that was a little bit part of the mystery.

But by then I was just like, I don't this is so dumb.

I just don't even care.

Right, there was this weird part where you remember the part where he's like drinking white Russians and he's like yelling at her, like, yes, right, I had nothing to do with anything.

Why does he want her to chug these white Russians with him?

It was crazy.

I felt like Natalie Gates when she wrote this, was writing about some of her failures in her two marriages.

M And I'm thinking that could have been a she was reliving a scene from her own life and that Yeah, he clinks very demanding and clink basically tells her like, I need you.

I need to buy some perfume for you, in my favorite perfume, and I'd like to put it on you because obviously I'm going to be spending the night with you tonight.

Yeah right, He says that to.

Her, I'm going to be spent obviously spending the night with you tonight, and you know we're gonna do the nasty and she's and she knows.

She's like, oh, I'm ready for that, and I'm twenty eight.

I've never done this before.

Yeah, you know it's it's it's a Conway Twitty song.

Never I've never been this far before, and I need a man with a slow hand.

Oh man, just drink these white Russians hurry up.

So another amusing thing is when they go to the talent show and there's like the older lady doing the hula dance.

Yeah, and they rag on that lady over and over, like every character that comes in is just putting this poor who laid it down, And I'm like, this, you're and that I had the same thought.

I was like, this is someone that she knows in real life.

There is something that Natalie Gates knows in real life.

Yeah, and she's taken them down.

Yeah.

I felt like, yeah, she was reliving a few things from her personal life in this in this book.

Yeah.

And then there's the uh, the ridiculous part where the spoil by the way, spoiler alert guys, there's the ridiculous part where the the seagull has the diamond under its under its wing.

That's where the diamond's been hidden the whole times, under the seagulls wing.

Yeah, barely walked right.

Yeah.

So it's a thirty nine carrot diamond, so it's huge, and they strap it to a seagull to get it off the ship.

And I mean I did an AI image generator.

I mean that, and that's that's pretty legit, right.

So I did that, and that diamond would be half the size of the seagulls body.

There's just no way, there's no way that can happen.

She did not think the physics of this.

No, you figure that Dell would look this open.

Bick, Hey, we got a change sawalls.

Yeah, And that's the point that I wanted to make was Dell.

Dell would go and not just Dell, but a lot of the publishers when the Gothics became a hit on the market in the seventies, and you know, they had paperback gold in their hands, they wanted to transform everything into a Gothic.

So they would go back and raid in the nineteen twenties, nineteen thirties, nineteen forties mysteries and they would jack them up to look like they were Gothics with just a you know, let's throw a gothic cover on it.

Let's throw the house on there with the one light, and we'll just make it a Gothic and everyone will read it thinking it's a brand new book.

But Dell kind of did the same thing here with this, because they're getting this hardcover novel from seventy one, which does not look like a Gothic, and they're like, hey, we can we can make this a Gothic because it's a vulnerable woman that's in trouble, and we don't need them.

Man, we'll talk about this book, but we don't need the mansion, we don't need the we don't need all this other stuff.

We don't need an inheritance.

We're just gonna throw it on here and make it a Gothic and people will buy it and people will read it, and but we know that it's not a Gothic, not not a gothic.

No, it fail.

It's it will go through it together, but I think it fails the gothic test.

Yeah, yeah, it's I would definitely say this is not even a mystery, it's a romance.

This is a romance book.

It's a romance novel, no doubt about it.

And I will say that the the general idea of her, so she's she takes care of her mother for like a year or something like that, and she dedicates her life to just taking care of her mother, So she has no personal life whatsoever.

Her sister didn't take care of the mom, didn't help her at all with the mom and felt guilty about it.

So she ends up giving her this year long cruise to say thank you for taking care of our mother while she was sick, and you gave up me sacrificed so much.

Right, Well, this was seventy one.

Sureley Jackson had already done this in fifty nine or I think sixty or fifty nine with The Haunting of hill House, because in that book, at the beginning, there's a woman who sacrificed her life to try to take care of her mother, and then she ends up getting the invitation to go, you know, spend the week or whatever it is in this gigantic mansion.

So you sort of get the same idea, let's take the woman who's taking care of her mother and sacrifice her personal life and put her somewhere.

Surey Jackson had already done that, so it's not even an original idea.

I mean, so it did it a lot better, much better.

Yeah, much better.

But yeah, do you want to go through the tests?

Yeah, let's do the test.

Yeah.

Oh well the ending Clink, they go to court, Clink ignores her for a year.

He comes back asked her to marry him.

Surprise with part of the diamond yep.

And then there's some tasteless joke at the end.

We don't even need to talk about it.

Oh, I was like that.

I was seriously, my draw my jaw just dropped at the end of that one.

You have to tell me that because I don't remember.

Oh it's the it's where she's she wants to give money to the miner that found the diamond in.

The firthplace, right, yes, And he's.

Like, oh, you know you're weak or whatever whatever.

He says, Oh, sure, honey for you.

And and then there's this joke about African birth control, like he's like, you need to set up a society for African birth control?

Yes, okay, oh my god, that was tasteless.

Yeah okay, So yeah, here we go on that wonderful note.

Here's the Gothic litmus test.

So we're going to go through the Gothic tropes and we're gonna check them off.

Where's my pen?

So first we got the cover art, got our book here, yep, there we go.

So for cover art, I have the woman running from a house?

Would you consider that?

Would you count that?

Is she there's no house, there's no there's not a light on us there unless you count that star.

Yeah, the star.

I mean, yeah, she's out there, looks like she's out in the in the fields.

She just called out of the bushes doing her business.

Yeah.

I mean, I would think just from the blues there and the because there's a lot of blue there, which is a which is another gothic thing.

So with the blues and then her facial expression, it looks like she's running, I would say there's enough there to say that is a gothic cover.

Yeah, yeah, I think how about Well, I think the point the reason we picked this is because it was a little bit different too, So I think we got to give a little leeway there, and we'll give them.

We'll give them that one.

We'll give them that one.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You you would originally pitched this to me saying, hey, let's read this because it's a gothic on a cruise ship.

And I was like, well, that sounds interesting.

It does right, it should be so exciting.

Well, let's see so one light on, No, there's no well do you count the star?

Do you count the stars?

The one light on?

I mean it's kind of creative.

They're out and they're outside.

Giving any kind of stars to this book is difficult, so say no, so.

Zero zero on the one light on.

So then we got the themes we have.

I have number one, stranger in a strange land.

Yeah, most definitely, righteah.

Yeah, she's she doesn't belong there, she's she's not native.

Number two is there gas lighting in this?

Yes?

I think in a way, because well, he makes he makes her feel in my opinion, he's making her feel inferior, and he's planting.

But he's not really the one doing it, but he is.

In a way, he's planting doubts in her mind whether she can take care of the diamond herself.

He needs to give it to her.

He's more secure than her, he's more responsible.

Yeah, yes, she's Yes, she can't handle this.

I would, I would vote that's a yes.

Yeah.

Gaslighting, yes, all right, gaslighting check.

Yeah.

And then number three, I have a handsome man with questionable motives.

Yes, most definitely, Yeah, a handsome man.

He's yeah, he was suspicious.

Number four is romance obviously yes.

Number five mystery.

Yeah, yeah, I know.

Man.

Maybe in my list does not fool proof, I know.

So we're all what Number six hints of the supernatural.

And no, absolutely not.

No.

Then we have the isolated setting.

No no, no, no no, I mean there's like three hundred people on this ship.

Yeah no.

And then we have the invitation.

So the Gothic invitation is usually something like she inherits it or they need they need her to be a nanny or a caregiver.

Well, she did kind of inherit this because her mother died, she's left.

At the end of this death, her sisters gives her this gift of going away for a year.

So it could have been could have been the same as mom died and left me, you know, a million dollars to go run away, or it could have been they needed me to be a cruise director on the cruise.

I've taken a job as a cruise director.

I've taken a job as a stewardess.

There's always some kind of job or role.

So I guess the inheritance thing kind of fits loosely into this.

I would say no, I would I'd say give her a zero on this one because it's not Yeah, that just that inheritance thing I think is a big part of it.

I mean, she was gifted this this trip, but yeah, I don't know it's it's on.

It could go either way.

It could.

I'll support your zero on that it doesn't fit the norm.

So we got one, two, three, four, five, six, We got a six.

Okay, so out of ten, six out of ten we have it.

So it's sixty Gothic forty romance.

Which I think is just incorrect.

I don't know if someone needs to go over this list.

Who wrote this thing?

Well, I mean it makes us guess our own parameters for Gothics.

Maybe it isn't as defined as we think.

Maybe it isn't as rigid.

Yeah, well a lot to make more episodes where people have to watch more episodes to figure this out.

Yeah, I think was sorely lacking here.

And what is not so much on our list at the moment is atmosphere.

Yeah, there is zero Gothic atmosphere in here.

They're on the ship, and there's what about the moonlight nights?

You know what I'm saying, what about like fog?

Yeah?

Yeah, that's the thing with the Gothics is that it normally is shore side.

It's typically going to be a house on the rocky shore.

There's going to be fog missed.

Possibly a tail or two of sailors lost at sea.

There's a widow's peak in the house, that kind of thing.

So we do get shore side, but we miss all the other atmosphere.

They could have put it.

She could have put it on a maybe an old cruise ship, you know, like maybe it's like it's kind of rusty, kind of falling apart, but this thing is like state of the art.

In fact, they mentioned the air conditioning a bunch in this, like you're just sitting in rooms of air conditioning.

I was like, that is so not Gothic.

It's so unbelievably not Gothic.

No, it yeah, atmospherically, it doesn't work at all.

I just I don't know the sixty percent I'm not feeling.

I think it may be like forty.

Yeah, it's not a Gothic, that's the bottom line.

Absolutely not a Gothic.

And dell, you know, they just they fooled us.

They tricked us, They fooled us.

Jerry, are you ready to show off some gothics here?

We each grab five.

Yeah, yeah, all right.

Man, why don't you go ahead and go first over there?

So this is kind of interesting.

I was at the airport with my wife and we were picking up her mother.

And at the Jacksonville Airport they have a little little bookshelf where you can pick up books and read them in the lobby, or you can take the books home.

They're they're there for free.

And this one doesn't have a cover, but I thought it was interesting.

It is a hardcover of Ravenscroft and dark Water.

So it's a two and one by Dorothy Eden, who wrote Gothics.

He's a really popular Gothic writer.

So you can see this hardcover.

It's all tattered, it's old, wow, green pages, and it's uh.

I didn't get a chance to look at it.

See that book has gothic atmosphere.

It's been around.

It says that this was printed in nineteen sixty four.

It's a first American edition nineteen sixty five, but a two in one.

And I want to say that I have the paperback of one of these, and I will say that both of these books are fairly popular Gothic books.

Ravens Croft and dark Water very popular gothic books.

I've seen him in stores beautiferent places.

Yeah, Dorothy Eden was one of the most popular writers there.

Yeah, she was, so we got speaking of Dorothy Eden, the first one up there.

I absolutely love this cover.

Yeah, that's great.

It's just beautiful.

Yeah, I love that.

So I don't know, I don't know anything about it.

I didn't even read the back.

I mean, obviously I read the back synopsis when I bought it.

But yeah, but yeah, it's just just a nice cover.

I just wanted to show off that cover and mentioned that Dorothy Eden was one of the most popular Wriners.

One time, I was dropping off this job shirts downtown.

It was in a you know, like a skyscraper, and I came down.

When I was going out out the doors, the rotating doors, there was a Dorothy Eden book all squished out like it had been rained on, and I was like, that is so sad.

Got yeah, really trapped in the rain, just.

Pored Dorothy Eden.

I should have grabbed it, saved or buried or at least.

Yeah, this is I can get it up there.

Virginia Kaufman moura, there we go, And I love the cover with her kind of peering up the staircase.

This is actually a sequel to a series.

This is nineteen fifty nine.

This is the Anne Wicklow series, and she is a housekeeper.

She gets hired to go to various places in the series, and there's a mystery everywhere.

My wife and I actually started reading this.

I would read to her in bed.

We have like a little thing that we were doing.

I would read to our books to her, and I started reading this one to where it was really really good, and it seems like it was legitimately going to be a supernatural book because at the beginning, she's at this large mansion on the sea and there's these slimy monsters that keep crawling up the side of the mansion and is like attacking the workers on the balcony.

And then they find like there's a bunch of residents that are dead and their bodies are like laying on the beach, like bloated, decomposing corpses on the beach.

Crazy, but god, that sounds awesome.

What is it again?

We showed it's a very popular Gothic, very popular Virginia Kaufman's Mora and it is starring Anne Wicklow and I reviewed one of her I read I reviewed one of these A series installments before, and she's a housekeeper.

She just shows up at you know, a house in one of the books and she'll find a Gothic mystery.

So the one that I had read before, I can't think of the name of it, but she fell in love with this guy and ends up getting killed at the end of the book.

But there wasn't It's a true Gothic It had a mystery to it and everything, so it was it was cool.

Yeah, that sounds awesome a gothic series.

Yeah, but we can.

I mean, if you want to get that book.

More absolutely, Okay.

I grabed this one because I wanted to mention that you did a wonderful episode on this author.

Oh yeah, yeah, okay, yeah, oh that's cool.

Whitch of Goblin's Acres.

I haven't seen that.

W.

E.

D Ross which there is a there's a podcast episode of The Paperback Warrior about W.

D Ross.

Yes, yeah, In fact, I have it right here on this coffee mug right there.

It is all the little Gothic ladies right there.

Hold on, well that's okay, okay, put it out there.

Where is she?

Where they at?

Right there?

They are Gothic.

The Gothic ladies are right there on that podcast episode.

So there you go.

That's nice.

This one it has it does mention the supernatural forces oh good, Okay, the area state known as Goblin's Acres.

So this sounds very uh sorry about that.

So this sounds yeah, this sounds like it would be a very high ranking on the litmus test.

Well, I mean, we know that William Ross wrote supernatural books because of the Dark Shadow series that he wrote.

It's got a vampire.

Oh yeah, Barnabas Collins.

Yeah, from the TV series.

Yeah, I've got the two books by kay Ashby, but I'm going to pur show you the first one here, So there we go, Crown Valley, Kay Ashby.

I love the cover with this eagle or bird whatever.

That It looks like an out of the Ashes, but a Gothic version of the Yeah, there you go.

She looks terrified.

This is nineteen seventy three Dell and it says she was warm, alive, in love.

Then why did everyone treat her like a ghost.

Maybe she's not alive, maybe she's maybe she's dead.

Oh wow, like a sixth sense the Others kind of thing.

Yeah, maybe it would be cool.

I thought The Others was kind of a gothic.

Most definitely, Yeah, most definitely.

I grabbed I've only got one of these, that's one of the horoscope ones.

Ah, simput, that's summer's end.

Yeah, a zodiac Gothic.

This is Gemini.

What are you?

I'm a virgo?

I was born in September.

I don't know what I am.

I was born in September.

Oh really?

Yeah?

The twenty are you before or after the twenty second?

Before?

Then?

You, my friend, are a virgo?

Also?

Nice?

Okay, wasn't aware of that?

How do you not know your how do you not know that?

I don't dig that stuff.

Yeah, but you've never been told you never dated a dated lady who told you what you are?

Problem?

Eric?

Oh, they've told me what I am for sure.

But it's not that.

This is the other k Ashby books.

She only did two.

This is The Climb a Dark Cliff.

It's again Dell, And I don't know.

Is that a Gothic key cover?

I mean, well, it's kind of horror.

Yeah it does.

Yeah, I don't know.

That's seventy two.

Does it say Gothic on the side of it or anything on the spine?

You know, it doesn't.

It doesn't actually say that, you know what.

You would think Dell would put that on there, but they didn't.

They're like up here, like up in the corner.

This one has it underneath it.

Nope, doesn't say it.

It says Fortress of Evil on the back.

It's about the sea cliffs in California.

It's a fortress of evil.

Who knows could be that's.

Cool though, Yeah, I'd be happy to find that one.

Yeah, Paperback Library.

House of Terror Edward Woodward, male author.

Yeah.

I wanted to, you know, point out as I as I said, this is a learning experience, and I think in the last video I said that there's no male authors with their name on the cover, and there's a ton so retraction.

That was a retraction.

Prove myself wrong here in case anyone calls me out.

Yeah, looks great.

Yeah, I don't know all these books that we got to read.

I know, I'll share this one just because it's hit.

I hate when easy eye they do these easy eye editions.

Have you got some of these?

Yeah, they shrink the actual cover down so they can make this big white stripe that serves no purpose and it says easy eye.

So this is it's a large print Gothic Geen Bellamy nineteen sixty nine and it's on it's on non glare paper.

Nick So the wait the paper paper, Yeah, not the cover.

No, it says non glare paper, that's what it says.

What the hell does that mean?

I don't know.

And it's a Magnum, Magnum.

Magnum easy eye.

Those aren't cool though, and you're like, oh, this is so much better.

Why did they make all books like this?

Yeah?

Really, I don't know.

Think my last one is this is one of my favorite covers, Dark Interval.

Oh yeah, okay, yeah, that is great.

Joan Aiken she woke to terror.

Uh artist Ron Lesser uh did some gothics and I want to say Joan Aigan was one of the ones that he did.

So that could be a Ron Lesser cover.

Oh that would explain That would explain it.

Because that she's a real hotty there and he wrote he painted hotties.

Yeah it actually, yeah, you're right, it does look it does look like that because yeah, just the way she is shaped there, mm hmm.

It looks more like one of the old crime crime covers yep, the mcguinnis or something.

Yeah, could be good.

Yeah, So did you want to pick a did you want to try to pick a book now or you want to I know we talked about it before, but I feel like we need to actually make sure it, like we needed to do an actual Gothic like the two books we did were kind of suspect or as the as the Generation says, sus.

It's very suss I'm looking for the term sus.

Then when people say it slaps, have you heard that?

I haven't good lord something it's slap and they say it.

When then when when they're saying it's like tough wax sabbath slaps.

Yeah, I never never say that.

Uh, I get some I have some ross over there over my shoulder.

If you have any of those.

I think I already reviewed Fog Island though.

W e d Yeah, the one the one that I showed.

Oh that's the only one you have, Okay.

I kind of when you know, I when I got that that Abalone Hall, when I was looking it up, I see him that he had some Gothics.

Yeah, and uh, do you have his geez?

What is it?

They he wrote him as Edween and noon on Edward Noon.

I know it's so.

Uh there's one over there though that I have.

I don't have any of them.

So whatever we would pick, I would I would have to order it.

But that's fine.

I don't know.

I think I think you do.

I think you have Dark Cypress.

That's what I thought too when I was over there looking for it.

Oh you have it, Yeah, you have it because I saw it in your book Hall and I commented on it.

Well, me let me tell you something.

Did you see that back there behind?

I see that mess?

Yeah, so maybe I do have it somewhere.

Well, if you have it, let's do that when I've read it before, but I want to read it again.

Okay, because it was so good.

Well, if you say I have it, then I have it.

Yeah, yeah, you do.

Well, maybe maybe it was a different Edwin and Noon that you had.

No, I think it was Dark Cypress because when I saw it online, I was like, I got that.

Yeah, I was looking for it, yeah, to show off here and I could.

It is it is like a four star Gothic.

It's a five.

It's a five star goths.

Oh that's so exciting.

It's really a Gothic.

You think you think it will Oh yeah, lank high on the checklist.

Yeah, yeah, it should be the it should be the standard going forward.

To compare it to Dark Cypress and the reason why I read it was Stephen Mertz, who loves Michael Iavaloni's writing, the late Stephen Mertz, who wrote in My Hunter and a bunch of action adventure novels in the mac Bolland universe.

He told me how great that gothic was, and he said it was the best Gothic he's ever read, and and then he he told me to get it.

So I ended up paying like twenty five dollars for it because it's really it's expensive, but I read it.

I was like, Okay, totally get it.

Now.

Why he said that because it's really good.

Oh man, We're definitely doing it Dark Cypress to people.

I'll pop the cover up on the on the screen there if anyone wants to join in, join in for the conversation.

Yeah, go out there and buy Dark Cypress.

That well, you can read along with us.

It'd be a lot of fun.

So we're gonna do yeah, do these like once a month.

They'll never be two hours again.

That was like, that was our pilot episode.

Remember when they just do the pilots, They would do the whole movie and the show would trim down.

Yeah, we're gonna we're gonna trim these down.

Yeah, we could We could try to do them live next time, and this one's recorded, but we can try to do them live if you want.

Oh yeah, yeah, you know, I'm down gon do comments and stuff.

Yeah yeah, that'd be cool.

Yeah, okay, radical all right, well then well let's let's call it a day then.

Are you ready?

Yeah, let's do it all right?

Goodbye everyone, thanks for watching, see you this time.

Peace out, Thanks bye bye, peace out.

Eric.

Yeah, that's what the kids do these days, right, Yeah,