I had a chance to read Jennifer Thorne‘s atmospheric folk horror Lute in late 2022, but still have it on the backlist of reviews to write for my blog. While I enjoyed that novel as a solid entry in the genre, it felt standard; there was little unique to stand out to me. But just as a fan of the genre, standard makes a great read when done effectively as Thorne achieved. I picked up Lute with no particular expectations, but my expectations were high with Diavola. I now knew Thorne could write an engaging story with a good central character, and I hold gothic, haunted house horror dearest of all.
The plot of Diavola has a horror for readers to relate to even absent any supernatural aspects: namely the family vacation. Anna Pace has arrived in Italy early, clandestinely avoiding the torture of flying with her family, and enjoying a few days of peaceful bliss in the city before meeting up with them at the small town villa her parents have rented. She’s dreading it like a prison sentence. The black sheep of the family, her life choices have been generally met with parental and sibling disapproval and disappointment, leading her to further independent resilience, bordering on spitefulness.
Unsurprisingly, she maintains her closest familial and emotional ties to her twin brother Benny. But Benny is joining the family vacation with his relatively new boyfriend Christopher, a man whose arrogant smugness seems to domineer Benny, who the family sees as normally a pushover for his twin sister. Strongest in that opinion is their sister Nicole, a mother who henpecks and jealously guards her husband from what she construes as Anna’s flirtations. While Nicole wants to control all aspects of the vacation, the patriarch of the family sits back in indifference – head buried in books – and the matriarch looks for family bliss with leveling judgement and criticism at Anna. Amid all the family conflict, Anna does show fondness and zero frustrations with Nicole’s children, who she enjoys spoiling, and perhaps also corrupting a bit as the cool aunt.
Oddities of the villa setting compound Anna’s unease with her family. The local townspeople react with sudden cold aloofness whenever Anna mentions the villa where they are staying. As she’s the only member of her family to speak Italian, the others rely on Anna for information and ease of communication, yet they don’t fully trust her. They are loathe to believe the trepidation, and eventually warnings, she receives from the locals and tries to pass on. As eerie as the locals act, the villa itself doubles down on the haunted house vibe, and what begins as a joke to calm the nerves slowly becomes a realization to Anna that more may be going on here, with a link to a mysterious woman that Anna sees in local artwork around the town. Central to it all is a tower with a locked door, and a warning from several that whatever the guests of the villa do, they should never try to enter that tower. So, of course they do.
Diavola is built on a gothic foundation of familiarity. Just look at that wonderful cover for the effect of that. The villa and its presentation (physically and by the locals) is a cliché that Anna (and most of her family) fully recognize from the get-go. Where Anna is attuned to the local culture through language to give more credence to superstition and the supernatural, all the others turn to full-blown denial, no matter what is going on. This divide just augments the familial rifts from personality and histories of conflict.
While that setup is predictable, where Thorne takes it from there is not. Diavola is interesting as a gothic horror through the inclusion of modern-day family vacation chaos and emotion. But it also follows a unique path from the setup and haunting and predictable responses to an original take on consequences and after-effects. This is particularly so in Thorne’s delving into Anna’s ability to come to turns with what has occurred and that has continued to haunt her, compared to the other family members’ inability and denial. For all of her faults, and all the blame that her family casts upon her about being unreliable, disappointing, or irresponsible, Thorne shows Anna to be the most emotional mature and adaptable of all, the only one willing to face and recognize the demons.
The largest disappointment for readers in Diavola may come from the lack of character complexity in everyone apart from Anna. As in Lute, Thorne does a fantastic job forming her protagonist into something complete. Though they may start as a ‘type’, these lead characters show themselves to be far more, and evolving. The other characters of Diavola equally start as clear ‘types’, but without any ensuing development into anything fuller. The novel foreshadows larger roles for some of those characters that could have come into play within the latter portions of the novel’s plot. That could have allowed more secondary character development; instead Diavola turns fully to focus on Anna in her isolation with the ghost(s) of the villa, literal and psychological.
Diavola has tension and some moments of terror within it, but atmospheric gothic dread aplenty. There is also mystery present in the nature of the villa’s history, its ghost, and its locked room (tower.) But there is also mystery in what exactly happened during one crucial night there that leads to the family completely splintering. Thorne ultimately reveals the answers to these mysteries in a satisfying way. Gothic horror fans should love it, as well as anyone who likes the concept of the bad family vacations. Some advertisement/blurbs for the novel mention comedic elements to that latter trope. While there to evoke a chuckle now and again in empathy for Anna’s plight, most of the comedy here is drowned out by the darkness and unease. Above all, the novel should appeal to those who’d be satisfied reading a story of a flawed but resolute female protagonist who is able to overcome betrayal, rejection, and horror to still find peace and purpose within.
