DARK SHADOWS FORUMS
Members' Mausoleum => Calendar Events / Announcements Archive => Calendar Events / Announcements '26 I => Calendar Events / Announcements '10 II => Topic started by: quentincollins on September 24, 2010, 04:05:15 AM
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I remember reading somewhere ages ago that Lara Parker was working on a third DS novel, anybody have any info on that, is it still coming out, is there a tenative release date, anything?
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At the past two Festivals, Parker has stated that the plot of her new novel will focus on Elizabeth as a young woman in the Roaring '20s. Flapper Elizabeth meets the eternally young and handsome Quentin and strikes up a relationship with him. Apparently, there will also be a second-string story in the present (1970s) about David's own romance. Parker has not announced a release date for her novel.
ProfStokes
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Be afraid. Be very, very afraid.
G. (hiding under the covers)
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So Quentin and Liz....together?? OK...that means, if they are involved in a romantic way, Quentin will be having an affair with his..great niece..??? YUCK....but then again it's a messed up family... Roger married his grandma..
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as anyone's who's read "the salem branch" can tell you parker is not above a signifigent yuck factor. why should this be any different.
incidentally that novel definitively soured me to any of lara's future fiction writing endeavours.
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YUCK....but then again it's a messed up family... Roger married his grandma..
Gives whole new meaning to the famous Louis Edmonds flub, "the incestors," doesn't it?
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Thanks for the info. I really liked Angelique's Descent a lot. The Salem Branch I did have issues with, but it had some good parts too. Some of the things that happened that I didn't care for in tSB might be developed better in this next book.
It's surprising and refreshing that the focus is on Liz, Quentin and David instead of Barnabas, who has been center stage in all the other novels. Nice to see other characters get the spotlight too.
Liz and Quentin? Wow. I assume she won't know the real nature of their relationship, and we know Quentin has the morals of an alley cat, so it's not totally unthinkable. Maybe I've read too much V.C. Andrews lol, but it sounds interesting.
I thought Liz was supposed to be born around 1920, the time frame really seems off. I wonder if they'll have Quentin be Victoria's father? That would be an interesting twist, and I like that option better than any one I've ever come across. Of course, Viki should be born around 1940 but maybe Liz and Quentin will meet back up around then long enough for him to impregnate her.
David's romance doesn't sound very interesting, and I'm assuming that his girl will be the one from the end of tSB.
Lara Parker's been talking about this for a couple of years? Maybe it will get published soon. I'm glad to know that another DS book is in the works, and I am glad to get another book from Lara Parker, but I wish they would put out DS novels by other writers too. Maybe the new movie will make that an option, although I expect tptb will focus on the new movie instead of the tv series.
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In the show, the family Bible listed Elizabeth as being born in 1917.
Gerard
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So if the book takes place in 1929 then Liz will be a 12 year old flapper! Very precocious our Liz! I do wish that the dates and ages were kept right. Couldn't Liz be going to speakeasies in the 30s instead?
I was thinking that Liz was about 50 when the show started, she was 49. When was Roger born? Seems like I read at one point her was supposed to be much younger and they tweaked his age to make them closer in age.
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When Harper-Collins started the new DS novel series, I was hoping to submit several novels to it. I wrote one, called Watcher on the Hill, set in the then present day (around 2000), and then started on a second one called Ocassion of Sin. It was designed to be an epic novel covering the Collins family from 1919 to 1966. One of the subplots dealt with Elizabeth and it included where her father Jamison took a 15-year-old Elizabeth and a 12-year-old Roger on a voyage to Europe on the Ile de France (so Jamison could arrange to have booze brought to America legally on his shipping line as Prohibition was ending). On the voygage, she meets a young man she falls in love with. In 1944, while she serves as a WAC in WWII, she meets him again in NYC. He's getting ready to sail for the Normandie invasion where he's killed. But before he leaves, one thing lead to another and she becomes pregnant and gives birth in February 1945 to a child who's guess who. Her family, hoping to avoid a scandal, makes her give the child up the baby in "Winter" of 1945.
I was about 200 pages into the novel (it would probably go to 1,000 - a real Stephen King epic) when I stopped writing it because the Harper-Collins program collapsed).
Gerard
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Those sound good. Maybe you could rework them as original novels the way Hawke's Harbor was. I'd love to have a new DS novel at least once a year, I would think there's a market for them, lots of tv tie in books get published regularly still.
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In the show, the family Bible listed Elizabeth as being born in 1917.
The ages and dates that they gave us on DS were often so out there, that I usually just make up my own calculations. It saves me from a lot of headaches trying to figure things out. lol. But if Lara Parker's new masterpiece has Liz as being old enough for romance in the 1920s, she must have been in her 60s/early 70s during the show's timeline. That is way out there. [ghost_shocked]
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Sounds great to me and a very interesting book !
Love Anne [ghost_smiley]
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In the Shadows on the Walll bible for DS, Liz is supposed to be 56 and Roger is supposed to be 36 at the start of the series in1966, but that was somewhat altered on the actual series. However, as others have pointed out, it wasn't altered to make Liz older, but to make her younger. In ep #267 we see that Liz was born on February 28, 1917 and Roger on September 14, 1925 (which still gives them an age gap that was crucial in their relationship, but not one of 20 years) so at that point in 1967 they're 50 and 41 respectively. (And to my memory there was never anything else on the series that contradicted those ages.) So, it's definitely inconceivable on so many levels that Liz would be romantically involved with Quentin at any point in the 1920s. But then Angelique's Descent proved that Ms. Parker doesn't give a flying fig about DS canon (despite saying repeatedly that she was completely committed to staying within it) because she completely altered what anyone would consider an extremely significant scene between Barnabas and Angelique that took place on the show during the original 1795/1796 storyline by adding her own dialogue which completely flipped the dynamic between Angelique and Barnabas as it had been established originally! [angryf] But then again, anyone who's read that novel knows that the apparent main purpose of it was to hit the reader over the head again and again with how much of a victim Angelique was, so apparently it was canon be damned. ::)
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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.
I hope Lara Parker reworks the story to keep Liz's age closer to being right. The story could probably be shifted from the 20s to late 30 without changing too much.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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wierd!
again the word "speculation" was changed in my post to "nun" even though i tried to modify it twice. weird!
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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.
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I assumed that this word "nun" popping up and replacing other words was some sort of joke that I was unaware of, but if so, I guess I'm not the only one who's clueless.
I don't think I'd go so far as to rank marriage among distant relatives up there with child labor, slavery, and the like. How distant is OK? Apparently, most European royalty is related to each other and marriage partners come from other royal families who are related. (And I discovered that my nephew and his girl friend, who met at college in a large city, are fourth cousins ... you never know what you'll find when you have a genealogist in the family!)
We've been told that marriage between first cousins became outlawed, presumably in the 20th century, because of advances in understanding genetics -- in other words, because of science, not moral or ethical reasons. However, I recently saw an article that said there actually is no reason, genetically speaking, that first cousins can't marry, because the genetic distance is great enough that fears that their offspring would have two heads, etc., is unfounded. I suspect that marriage between cousins simply seems uncomfortable to us because that is a 20th century view.
But to return to this as subject matter for Lara Parker's new novel, I would have to say it's not what I would be interested in reading.
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I've read a lot of historical fiction so the idea of romantic relationships between cousins doesn't really strike me as skeevy, but I think I would draw the line at uncle and niece...even a couple of generations apart as Liz and Quentin would be.
But, to be perfectly frank, I'm not a big fan of Lara Parker's take on the DS world in general, so I probably won't be reading her new tome anyway.
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. . . in Frankenstein Elizabeth was raised with Victor as siblings but I don't remember them being blood related.
Mary Shelley made substantial changes between the first and second editions of Frankenstein. In the first edition, Elizabeth is a cousin of Victor's but I don't recall if she's a first cousin or a distant cousin. The familial connection was changed in the second edition.
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.
Catherine Linton marries two of her cousins, one the son of her paternal aunt Isabella (Linton) - admittedly under duress by Heathcliff; and secondly, the son of her maternal uncle Hindley (Hareton). It is this second marriage which can be interpreted as redemptive. No concerns of incest here.
I'm more worried about the timeline with Liz being a flapper in the 20s, when she should be far too young.
That doesn't seem to work too well.