Stranger by the Lake

Stranger by the Lake is a gothic romance published as a Dell paperback in 1971. Its heroine, Susan Marlow, has loved Greenwood Manor since childhood, mostly because of its mistress, her aunt Lady Agatha Gordon, and the novel opens with Susan coming home to a house that has changed in her absence.

The change has a name. Lady Agatha has installed Craig Stanton as a permanent guest, and she describes him as a genius who will cast fresh light on the Gordon family history and as the one person in the world she can trust. Susan reads him differently: a man of strange powers who has woven a spell over her aunt. Much of the novel turns on what he actually wants from the house, the family name and the household that has accepted him, and on the fact that Susan is drawn to him against her own judgement.

The book works with the furniture of the nineteen-seventies gothic romance: an isolated estate, a family history nobody has finished explaining, a newcomer whose motives stay unclear, and a young heroine whose account of events the reader has to weigh. Its mystery stays inside the household, and its tension comes from Susan having to decide how far she trusts her own reading of the people around her, including the man she cannot keep away from.