Medusa’s Web Is a Time-Twisting, Gothic Hollywood Suspense Tale

Medusa’s Web opens with an almost aggressively Gothic situation: siblings Madeline and Scott return to their childhood home, Caveat, after the suicide of their Aunt Amity. They have returned due to the eccentric Scooby-Doing of Aunt Amity’s will, written in the moments before she died. Of course it won’t stand up in court—no woman who climbs to the top of the roof and pulls a grenade (a grenade!) can be judged in her right mind—but they hope to come to terms with whatever it is that people return to unhappy homes to find. They are met at the door of Caveat, the ramshackle set of buildings that have mushroomed since the 1920s, by their cousins, Ariel and Claimayne. Ariel is a nasty piece of work, spitting anger, disgusted with herself and the terms of this will. Claimayne is a different kind of poison, his skin drawn tight around his bones, laughing in a way that feels cruel, but not in any way you can put your finger on.
Everything about the opening is full of portent, from the foreboding names to the interpersonal weirdness. Amity, of course, means friendship, but has been been associated with the occult since Amityville Horror. Caveat means a warning, as in caveat emptor—buyer beware—but the exact meaning of the warning has worn away. Madeline and Scott are drawn into the Gothic trappings of their upbringing, the one they ran away from. Scott pulls a piece of paper from an envelope left to him by his aunt, one limned with a stylized spider, and suddenly finds himself somewhere in the past, in another person’s body, and then now, shaken and shaky. The spider—the Medusa head, with her snakes for hair—is some kind of time travel, shifting people between bodies before, and now, and after.

This supernatural time jumping forms the center of the novel, our principles switching bodies with those exemplars of old Hollywood Rudolf Valentino and Alla Nazimova, among others, and the past is somewhere between possession and wish-fulfillment. There’s a whole secret history of obsession and selfishness that existed before the Hays Code sanitized early Hollywood, and Powers binds it up into a family saga of shifting, half-said needs. Boy howdy, this is heady stuff. It reminded me a little of the first season of American Horror Story, with its crumbling California manse, and the layers of bodies that hold it up.
For much of the book, our cousins, both those left behind and those returning, don’t feel as real as that lost Hollywood. They are children left in the decaying splendor of  forgotten time, the Gothic conclusion of crumbling homes and lost dreams. But by the end, they roar back, the inevitable “after” of the time before. The Gothic, with its sins of the father and crude decay, is a wonderful, perfect world for secret histories. You can’t go home again. You never could. But you might be able to move forward.