Kathleen Stewart's powerful gothic novel takes the trappings of `normal' suburban life and fills them with menace. Recording the horror of her narrow domestic existence in a secret book, Eleanora, the narrator, tells the reader of an abusive father, now dead, and a cold, controlling mother, very much alive, who refuses to accept her daughter's version of reality. When she begins writing her journal, Eleanora is living with her mother in a destructive symbiosis of polite mutual torture. With the arrival of a boarder, who seduces and provokes both mother and daughter, the reader discovers what Eleanora has hitherto repressed. The above description, which cannot do justice to the complexity of either the plot Stewart has created or the ideas she has explored, makes The Red Room sound like one of any number of novels which cut away the veneer of suburban contentment to expose unhappy lives. The Red Room, however, is disturbingly different, as Stewart takes every nastiness to its extreme. The reader is continually shocked as Eleanora's journal lays open increasingly terrible secrets to a voyeuristic reader. It all makes for discomforting reading, but this novel is absolutely compelling.

Lorien Kaye is assistant editor of Australian Bookseller & Publisher. 

C. 1999 Thorpe-Bowker and contributors

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