Everyday Gothic
Like the best of Hitchcock, Monica Wood?s new novel is an intimate shocker.
By Richard Grant
Bad things happen, even in the quiet, picturesque towns of rural Maine.Any Bitter Thing (Chronicle Books, San Francisco, California; hardcover; 351 pages; $23.95), the most ambitious offering to date from Portland novelist Monica Wood, opens with a nearly fatal hit-and-run car accident - and that's just for starters. Joyriding teenagers are among the least alarming actors in this Grand Guignol of everyday, all-too-plausible calamity. We meet a child who has lost her parents at age two; a likable young priest charged with sexual molestation; a neighbor who drinks and terrorizes his wife; trusted loved ones capable of breathtaking betrayal; ordinary human beings who blithely destroy one another's lives.
