In the past couple of days we've had two short sharp afternoon showers of rain, totaling more than we've had in weeks. This morning I woke to a leaden sky. Hmmm--that looked promising. Good day to settle down with a good book. Preferably an old favorite--familiar characters, familiar situation. And in my case--and yes, I'm not exactly like other people--maybe a ghost or two.

So I piled up with Barbara Michaels's 1971 novel THE CRYING CHILD. It begins with a sad, sad premise: a woman who has lost a child to miscarriage. However, on the tiny island in Maine's Casco Bay where the story is set, her loss stirs up the spirits of a mother and child who died in 1846.

Very conventional story: the hauntings, the Gothic trappings, the lovers in danger. There's a huge fancy mansion built by a seafaring man for his legitimate family, with a wing added on for a mistress and illegitimate child whom he smuggled in under the guise of an adoptee and his nurse; there's a spooky old family graveyard whose most conspicuous features are a truly hideous New England Gothic revival mausoleum and a tombstone outside the fence that bear only the name "Miss Smith" and a date; and there are the ghosts. The more insidious of the two is a mere sound--of a small child crying in the distance; the other is a full-fledged materialization of a woman in a cape.

And--this being a Michaels book--there are cats. Mostly Maine coons, those magnificent furballs that look like pintsize lions with great plumy tails, they are almost as major characters as the humans.

In 1996 THE CRYING CHILD was a made for TV movie, with Mariel Hemingway as the mother who miscarried her child and Finola Hughes in the role of her concerned sister. Billed as "based on the novel by Barbara Michaels", it was based on the novel in only the loosest sense; characters added, characters subtracted, and a contrived explosion and fire at the end.

The book's better.



If anybody comes looking for me, I'll be in a corner somewhere with a book.