Lara Parker's Third DS novel?

[michael c]

let me try and understand this...

so parker is seriously going to publish a novel about an incestuous relationship between elizabeth and quentin? or is that just speculation?

and she thinks fans of the series will like that?

apart from being really, really yucky wouldn't liz have recognized quentin when he showed up at her house in 1970 claiming to be yet another hitherto unknown relative coming out of nowhere.

and since barnabas was entombed in the 1920's doesn't that take him completely out of the action? whatevs.

[quentincollins]

From what I've heard it's just said that Quentin and Liz will meet, the incest is pure speculation. I may even have been the one who started speculating.
We have very little info at this point. Quentin and Liz may meet in a jazz club outside of Collinsport without knowing their true relationship. At most Liz might notice a resemblance between Quentin and an old family photo, but it's reasonable that she wouldn't think anything of that. Youwould think they would recongnise each other in 1970, but a lot of years had passed and he hadn't aged so she may have dismissed the resemblance as a coincidence. Liz at that point should be pretty used to people who looked like other people.
The book is supposed to go back and forth between the 20s and the modern day, so Barnabas will probably be in the modern day parts. Barnabas has been center stage in the three modern DS novels, I'm fine for other characters to get the spotlight for a change.
I may be in the minority but I think it's an interesting idea. Incest in fiction can be an interesting taboo to explore, but I am a fan of old V.C. Andrews books.

[Mysterious Benefactor]

For any issues of continuity in Angelique's Descent I take everything Angelique says with a grain of salt. After all, the main text is from Angelique's diary, and we only have Angelique's word that she's telling the truth.
I don't know if Lara Parker intended for us to doubt Angelique's version of things, but it seems like a very legitimate interpretation.

If it wasn't for Ms. Parker's often repeated claims that she kept completely within DS canon (not to mention that she had "someone" reading the novel to make absolutely sure that it stayed within canon (no doubt the same "someone" who let so many errors slip into the PomPress books )), I would certainly agree that events being Angelique's version of things could be a legitimate interpretation of much of Angelique's Descent. But because of those claims, I can't interpret the novel that way - particularly when Ms. Parker recreated 1795/1796 scenes word for word from the actual show. And when she stuck in her own dialogue that was clearly never on the show nor ever intended to be there because it so tipped things to Angelique's side when, as presented on the show, the events in Martinique were clearly always intended to be a He Said/She Said situation, that irrevocably killed AD for me and it killed any belief that Ms. Parker wouldn't twist actual show events for her own purposes.

[quentincollins]

I'm not sure what LP's intentions were, but by the time AD came out the series was available on video so she had to know that people would be able to point out the bits she changed.
 I wonder if LP will write anything intended for the new DS audios, AD was abridged for audiobook by Big Finish.

[Mysterious Benefactor]

I'm not sure what LP's intentions were, but by the time AD came out the series was available on video so she had to know that people would be able to point out the bits she changed.

Exactly - which makes many of the things she said back in 1998 all the stranger. But there you have it...

[Philippe Cordier]

I'm not an expert on Gothic literature, but Lara Parker teaches English and no doubt knows that incest themes are common in the history of the genre, an offshoot of Romanticism. It may begin with "The Castle of Ontronto," which I've never read. (Byron had an incestous affair with his half sister, and didn't Percy Shelley have some similar situation?) In the 1818 version of "Frankenstein," Elizabeth is Victor's cousin. In "Wuthering Heights," Heathcliff and Cathy grow up almost as siblings. "The Fall of the House of Usher" is generally interpreted as having incestuous themes, but I don't know if that's due to later Freudian criticism or not. Clearly Poe was writing one of the quintessential Gothic stories. There was a suggestion of incest (if I remember correctly) in Roger's affection for Carolyn at an early stage of the series, too. So by including a hint of incest, Lara Parker would be writing in the Gothic tradition, which includes "Dark Shadows."

On the other hand, is a grand-niece all that close a relationship? It used to be fairly common for first cousins to marry in this country. I was just reading a friend's genealogy of her family that came to Maine from England in the early 1600s, and the book (published in the 1800s) says that many of the grandchildren of the immigrant patriarch intermarried. And Franklin Delano Roosevelt married his first cousin, Eleanor.

[The Doctor and K9]

In Frankenstein, if I'm remembering correctly, Elizabeth is called a cousin but she was actually adopted by the family. I think she was a waif the parents found in their travels in a foreign country. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure I'm remembering accurately. I suppose you could call that incest, but if Greg and Marcia Brady wanted to get married, I'd say congratulations. I don't think it's incest if close GENETIC relationships are not involved. I know I might be in the minority there, but that's how I see it. 

[quentincollins]

I definitely see incestous subtext in Fall of the House of Usher.
I didn't feel any real incestous undertones in Roger and Carolyn's interactions, but I was probably too  busy anaylising the homoerotic subtext between Roger and Burke.
IIRC, in Frankenstein Elizabeth was raised with Victor as siblings but I don't remember them being blood related.
In Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff and Cathy were also raised togather, and in the second generation, her daughter Cathy was in love with her first cousin.
So there is a tradtion of incest in gothic stories. I'm not put off by that, it can make for a good story. I'm more worried about the timeline with Liz being a flapper in the 20s, when she should be far too young.

[michael c]

i suppose there were lots of things that were considered "acceptable" in the nineteenth century...you know, enslavement, child labor, the fact that women could not own property or vote...and i guess sexual relations between distant relatives that in the twenty first century are no longer considered acceptable.

so count me among those who would consider such a story about these two characters not as "an interesting theme to explore" but unacceptable. and yucky. very, very yucky.

[Joeytrom]

In regards to Roger marrying his grandmother, could the writers have not realized Laura Murdoch was Roger's wife in an earlier storyline as none of them were writing the show at the time?

[The Doctor and K9]

I think that's very likely. They might never have visualized the family tree. I listened to those 1897 eps several times and watched them at least twice before it dawned on me. DS was an "audio drama" for me at first. I had cassette tapes of large chunks of the story.

[ClaudeNorth]

so parker is seriously going to publish a novel about an incestuous relationship between elizabeth and quentin? or is that just nun?

...didn't Percy Shelley have some similar nun...There was a nun of incest

I don't understand the use of the word 'nun' here.  I'm assuming the word is not being used to refer to a female member of a religious order or the 14th letter of the Hebrew alphabet.  Google didn't turn up anything, either.

[michael c]

claude...

i'm just as confused(and rather alarmed)as you are. i didn't use the word "nun" in my post. i very clearly used the word "speculation" through some glitch the word have been changed in my post and probably the others too. i recall it being a "hint" of incest in the post about roger and carolyn.

[michael c]

wierd!

again the word "speculation" was changed in my post to "nun" even though i tried to modify it twice. weird!

[Gothick]

So, from all this I'm "speculating" that in the Depp Shadows version of the story, Barnabas pays Sam Evans to age Angelique's portrait so that she is the splitting image of Mother Angelica.  When Angelique looks at herself in the mirror, she is so horrified at what she sees that she drives to the Rockport Foundry and hurls herself inot the middle of the furnace.  In gratitude, the citizens of Collinsport sing and dance to the tune of "Ding dong the Witch-bitch is did."

As for the baboon, that's clearly a reference to an earlier storyline in Depp shadows where Julia injects Barnabas with a very large hypo which promptly turns him into a screaming, gibbering baboon.

Or am I on the wrong track here?

G.