Bluebeard’s Castle by Anna Biller

Anna Biller is herself an exciting, energetic book reviewer. See for example her review of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, or her other Goodreads reviews. So we’ll try to bring you the same as we review her upcoming novel, Bluebeard’s Castle.

We requested a review copy because we’re Anna Biller fans after watching the 2016 film The Love Witch. This movie can be called a cult classic. A term like that and what it says is the sort of concept Biller herself might interrogate in one of the essays on her website.

The great thing about The Love Witch is that it’s totally unique. Who else is doing this? What’s another movie like this? It’s amazing that a movie like that exists. You can feel this is a project from someone with a singular vision. The Love Witch is striking, funny, odd, with a style that’s both homage and sendup of sort of 60s-70s Vincent Price era glam horror? After seeing it we followed Anna Biller on Twitter, where she mixes it up, mostly about film, in a fun way. Really though our way in is the director’s longer pieces of writing, like this account of the awfulness of working in a Honolulu hostess bar.

Bluebeard’s Castle is exactly what it purports to be, a retelling of the Bluebeard fairy tale/story/case study. But it’s more, a kind of play on the whole idea of the gothic novel, done with enthusiasm. A striking feature of it is that while it’s specific (we learn what people eat:

) the story also plays in a dreamlike timelessness.

Very cool and thrilling, even just on the sentence level. Nothing here is as it seems.

A+, excited to see the reaction when this book is released on October 10, 2023. Great for Halloween.