The best novels where the sense of place is so strong it becomes a character

Rebecca is a prime example of a book where the sense of place is so strong that it becomes a character. Manderley, based on a real-life Cornwall estate du Maurier was obsessed with, is vividly evoked in all its haunting beauty and underlying horror. The house and grounds also reflect the different characters of the unnamed narrator and Rebecca. The West Wing with its view of the sea is gorgeous but cruel like Rebecca, while the East Wing looking out on a rose garden is plain but nice like the narrator. I love this book, have read it many times, and presented “Reading like a Writer” workshops focusing on it.

I discovered Summer when I first moved to the Berkshires, and it quickly became my favorite of all Wharton’s novels. From the opening scene in which a playful June breeze whisks the hat off a young man, catching the attention of a local girl, I was captivated by this story of young love played out against a month of languid, sunny days filled with flowers, green grass, and leafy trees. But as summer edges into fall, the love story falters, giving way to a chilling encounter on The Mountain that has shadowed Wharton’s sensuously described landscape all along. 

Worlds apart, islands have always fascinated me. I was enthralled by Raven Black, the first book in a thriller series, set in the Shetland Islands. The Shetlands attract artists with their natural beauty, birders with their abundance of avian life, and people hoping to escape a difficult past and start afresh with their remoteness. Consisting of scattered crofts (farms), moors, peat bogs, and cliffs overlooking the ocean, the islands are accessed by plane and ferry except when foul weather renders them unreachable. Then the isolation can become unbearable. This is apparent in the opening scene: an old half-witted man whose only companion is a caged raven, waits for visitors to welcome in the New Year—visitors who haven’t come in years and when they finally do, they bring trouble. 

I was drawn to this book because it’s loaded with atmosphere, and features hill folk like I do, with the difference that McCrumb’s characters inhabit the hills of Tennessee, while mine live in the Berkshire Hills of Western Massachusetts. I especially like the way she weaves local lore and legends into the story, and how she reveals how the landscape appears to different characters, ranging from a long-ago woman, kidnapped by Indians who escapes and makes her way homeward, to a modern-day non-hillbilly who struggles to re-create her difficult journey. Then, there’s the way McCrumb adds a dash of the supernatural through a character with psychic powers—all of which have been grist to my fictional mill.

I love how Dean takes a creepy cow head on a barn, and builds a compelling mystery around it. The cow head permeates the book, watching, judging, accusing, and shedding tears in the aftermath of a storm—seemingly more alive than wooden. Next to the cow head, snow is the dominant image. It’s a place for fun, as the main character and her close friend create snow angels, but it also carries a warning in the form of a message written in white, and as a blizzard, it knocks out the power in town, making getting around dangerous. Set in New England in the dead of winter, this is a book to read on a dark, frigid night with a hot drink and a blazing fire.