The Golden Key

October 21, 2019
Womack‘s ethereal debut novel (following 2018’s short story collection Lost Objects) is precise and eerie, but emotionally flat. In the late-Victorian era, Samuel Moncrieff, a melancholy university student escaping a tragedy, the details of which remain murky, joins his godfather in London and falls in with a demimonde of actors and occultists. Meanwhile, Eliza Waltraud mourns her breakup with her “life companion,” Mina, by retreating to a family property haunted by her mother in the strange stretch of English countryside called the Fens. Connecting Eliza and Samuel is respected medium and master of disguise Helena Walton-Cisneros, whose investigation into a 20-year-old disappearance in the Fens puts her on the trail of both Mina and Samuel. Plot and character alike are subordinated to dazzling atmospherics and a pervasive humorless gloom. With a slow, dreamlike pace, this could hardly be considered a page-turner, and readers looking for a more traditional supernatural detective story will be dissatisfied. Patient readers willing to wade through Womack’s murky, off-kilter world will be rewarded with moments of disquieting beauty. Agent: Alexander Cochran, the C&W Agency.

February 1, 2020
Womack's first novel, following her acclaimed dystopian anthology, Lost Objects (2018), continues her exploration of other worlds, this time examining the borders between reality and fairyland. In 1901, shortly after the death of Queen Victoria, Helena Walton-Cisneros, an independent investigator of missing children, is hired to reexamine a 20-year-old case involving three young girls. Their disappearance coincided with the appearance of a foundling given the name Samuel Moncrieff. While several children are reported missing in London, a distressed Samuel comes to stay at the home of his godfather, a prominent member of the British spiritualist community. The investigation hints at a link between the two, but how can a man who was a baby at the time of the disappearances have had anything to do with the missing girls, and how is he linked to recent events? Spiritualism, the suffragette movement, and the fairy tales of Lewis Carroll and George MacDonald combine with the author's lyrical writing style to convey an elegant sense of mystery and otherworldliness. This gothic fantasy will captivate fans of historical fiction.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)