To be frank, I have done very little research into the phenomenon of the 1960s Gothic novel, although I can tell you that A) they were in a long and formerly honorable tradition--one that includes such revered literature as FRANKENSTEIN, WUTHERING HEIGHTS, JANE EYRE, and the most Grand Guignol of them all, DRACULA; B) that they came into vogue yet again in such works from the 1930s as Daphne du Maurier's REBECCA, and C) I read a good number of them as a precocious preteen in the late sixties and early seventies. The plots followed a fairly standardized pattern: deadly secrets, beautiful damsel in distress, handsome dominant hero, hissing villain, sinister secondary characters who turn out to be good guys, highly improbable methods of murder, damsel rescued from death (or that cliched fate worse than) by the wounded but valiant hero, and they live happily ever after with the cloud lifted from them. Some--like those of Dame Mary Stewart, Phyllis A. Whitney, Dorothy Eden and Victoria Holt (aka Jean Plaidy, among other noms de plumes)--were surprisingly well written; others were merely lurid, as evinced by a subgenre in which the villains were all devil worshippers or madmen seeking to attain eternal life without actually dying and were therefore on the prowl for virgins to sacrifice.

And then, in a Reader's Digest Condensed Book, I ran across my first Barbara Michaels novel: AMMIE, COME HOME (1968), which combined the stock plots with my beloved ghost stories. (I can hear someone grumbling: doesn't this damned woman ever read ANYTHING but ghost stories? Yes, I do. Once in awhile. Remind me to blog sometime about Vicki Lewis Thompson's Nerd series.)

Barbara Michaels is one of two pseudonyms used by the professional Egyptologist Barbara Mertz, who uses her real name only for works on her archaeological discipline. She had written two previous Gothic thrillers (THE MASTER OF BLACKTOWER in 1966 and SONS OF THE WOLF in 1967), both set in Victorian England and stuffily conventional. With AMMIE, COME HOME she broke out of this mold altogether. Set in 1960s Georgetown, now a suburb of Washington, DC but originally George Town, a pre-Revolutionary war settlement named for George III, it tells the story of an 1830s-era house haunted by a tragedy that occurred in 1780, in an earlier house on the site.

Even with the truncations imposed by a condensation, the story was compelling: Ruth Bennett, a longtime Georgetown resident, inherits a house from an elderly cousin, and moves into it with her niece, Sara, a Georgetown University student. The juxtaposition of young Sara, her student boyfriend Bruce, and their anthropology professor, Pat McDougall, somehow taps into events from 1780. In that time, it's revealed over the course of the book, the builder of the first house on the site, the Tory Douglas Campbell, his daughter Amanda (Ammie), and her lover, Captain Anthony Doyle of the Continental Army, formed a deadly triangle; the incestuous Douglas ended by murdering his daughter and her lover. The haunting begins when Sara is overshadowed by Amanda during a seance, and plays out until Douglas's angry hateful spirit is finally exorcized, while Ammie and Doyle's bodies are located, removed from the cellar, and given Christian burial.

Barbara Mertz is an excellent writer, good with atmosphere; her descriptions of the old Federal-style mansions of Georgetown, its restaurants and shops, are masterful. To a critical eye, once the supernatural manifestations begin, they come a bit too thick and fast. The most affecting manifestations are the smell of lilacs, as they would have smelled in April 1780 (the story is set in October and November in roughly 1967), and the sound of a voice that moans, "Ammie, come home"--the only manifestation of Anthony Doyle. The more conventionally melodramatic flourishes are from the wicked Douglas Campbell, who shows himself as a column of smoke and an unnatural cold in one area of the living room--coincidentally, immediately over the pathetic graves of Ammie and Doyle.

In later books published under the Michaels name, Mertz made the supernatural occurrences fewer and more subtle, and her characters edgier and less cardboard gothic stock. Her best in my estimation is VANISH WITH THE ROSE (1992), with the most memorable ghostly event being the disembodied tinkling of an antique music box.

Ruth Bennett and Pat MacDougall, a middleaged couple who, like Sara and Bruce, end up with the conventional happily-ever-after, also appear in two other Michaels novels, SHATTERED SILK (1986), which dispenses with the supernatural altogether but repeats AMMIE's incest subplot; and STITCHES IN TIME (1995), in which the haunting results from a cursed quilt made by a slave girl in the pre-Civil War era.

Gotta say, though, probably because it was the first of her novels I ever read, AMMIE, COME HOME is still my favorite Barbara Michaels.

In fact, I'm reading it for the umpteenth time and am still overwhelmed by the scent of lilacs and the desolate wail "Ammie, come home."

Yeah, I'll be in a corner somewhere with a book.