The Wages of Sin by Alex Beecroft reviewed by Ruth Sims

In "The Wages of Sin", Alex Beecroft channels Edgar Allen Poe, though Poe might raise his eyebrows a bit (or not) at the eroticism in Chapter… Oh, I won’t tell you which chapter. You’ll have to read the book. But it’s there. And it’s a beautifully written scorcher. But it’s not the main point of the story. The focus of the story is terror.

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It’s said that comparisons are odious. However, I don’t think that author Alex Beecroft will mind at all if I compare The Wages of Sin to the gasp-inducing writings of the master. In Wages of Sin, atmosphere is everything: it’s alive. It broods, it hovers in dark and menacing mists; it’s eerie, ghostly and ghastly. If daylight ever comes or the sun ever shines in the story I don’t remember it. Alex Beecroft is a master of description and uses every sense available. Sometimes I think she invents new ones.

In Wages of Sin, a typically grand Gothic house is haunted, but by whom and why no one knows. An amorphous woman is seen, her white garments floating like cobwebs. Who is she? The catching cry of a newborn baby seems to wail from the very stones, as it has for centuries. But what baby? And when ghosts appear, can unexplainable, violent death be far behind?

Charles Latham, the aimless second son of the Earl of Clitheroe, is attacked at night, while drunk, by a dark, vaporous entity that threatens to enter and steal his very being. Shaken but convinced he was hallucinating while in his cups, he arrives home to find the household in turmoil. His father is horridly dead, with a white handprint across his face and his nostrils packed with dirt. Within days fire breaks out in the room of Charles’ terminally ill sister-in-law. But natural causes have no part in her death. She, too, has a skeletal handprint on her face.

Bizarrely, Charles’ brother convinces himself that their father died a natural death! Charles refuses to join his brother’s self-delusion. He believes it was murder. He even has a suspect: Jasper, a young defrocked priest, a strong, virile man with the strength to commit murder. Charles suspects Jasper also has the motive: he hated the Earl. Jasper is dark and brooding, given to oblique comments about other-worldly happenings and hauntings at the stately home in the shadows. Though Charles starts out wanting to prove Jasper guilty of murder, he finds himself drawn inexorably to the man, and lets Jasper convince him of his innocence. Further, Jasper convinces him that supernatural beings wander the halls of the Latham house and they must be exorcised before they kill again. Though still partly doubting, Charles joins with Jasper in the surreal hunt for the spectral killer.

Is Jasper a force for good, who will ultimately rid the Latham family of a dreadful curse? Or is he a beautiful, seductive force for evil who will ultimately bring Charles and his family down to ruin? The answer comes with shivers a-plenty. If you like Gothics and ghosties and things that go bump in the night, all rolled up with man-man romance, you can’t afford to miss The Wages of Sin.

The Wages of Sin
Alex Beecroft
MLR Press, 2010
ISBN 978-1-60820-125-9 (ebook)
$3.50

Ruth Sims is the author of the acclaimed novel The Phoenix.

She has lived her entire life in conservative, Republican, tiny-town Midwest USA surrounded by corn-, wheat-, and soybean fields. Like Emily Dickinson she has never seen a Moor and has never seen the Sea (except, unlike Dickinson, in films) but she's seen plenty of silos, Amish buggies, whitetails, and amber waves of grain.

She is the author of several novels. Her story The Legend of Mountain Ash was published in I Do Two! , the antholgy in support of gay marriage.

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