Closed at Dusk by Monica Dickens ~ 1990. This edition: Penguin, 1991. Paperback. ISBN: 0-14-012371-7. 220 pages.
Monica Dickens, middlebrow writer extraordinaire, made her name at a very young age with several creatively autobiographical books based on her pre-war and wartime jobs – One Pair of Hands (working as a cook-general) in 1939, and One Pair of Feet (nursing) in 1942 – and a whole slew of excellent novels, all sharing strong characterizations and allowing Dickens much scope to share the thoughts generated by her keenly contemplative X-ray eye, embellished with her sometimes rather biting sense of humour.
Occasionally Monica Dickens turned her hand to mildly macabre suspense novels, and this one, published just two years before her death at the age of seventy-seven, is really quite disturbing in an insidious way.
Closed at Dusk is an increasingly eerie story of thwarted love and revenge intruding upon a normal, happy, absolutely well-meaning British family, whose main collective sin is of occasional obtuseness to the emotional lives of those around them.
The upper class Taylors own a palatial country residence, surrounded by beautiful gardens. They have worked hard to keep their home in the family and to restore it from the combined ravages of wartime army occupation and the eccentric ways of the late family matriarch, who lived reclusively in one room while the house deteriorated around her.
The estate is known as The Sanctuary, and it is open to paying visitors much of the year, who patronize the tea room, walk through the beautifully landscaped grounds, and enjoy the animal-themed statuary originally collected by the earlier generations of the current family, as they established a Victorian era rural retreat “where all things could be at peace.”
All is indeed well with the Taylors, but things are about to change…
Tessa, adult daughter of the current owners, has some years earlier made an unfortunate marriage, in that her husband has heartlessly divorced his first “bland, beige” first wife to take up with vibrant Tessa. They have a child, and then the fickle Rex is off with yet another woman, divorcing Tessa in her turn.
Tessa copes quite well with her fate as a cast off wife, for her ex-husband is, to put it mildly, an utter jerk, and she’s well rid of him and knows it, but Discarded Wife Number One is still out there, very much not coping well with her destroyed life, and she is plotting a revenge scenario against the woman whom she blames for the destruction of her marriage, and the terrible loss of her own unborn child.
Taking on an invented persona, the meek, bland Marigold transforms herself into the vivacious Jo, and she cleverly slides into a an ever-more-involved position as a trusty staffer at The Sanctuary, gaining the confidence of the family and learning what makes them all tick, in order that her eventual revenge shall hurt the hardest it possibly can.
Oh, yes, and there’s a subplot of supernatural goings-on – perhaps imagined, or maybe not – which adds a decided miasma of foreboding to this well-paced, ever-more-troubling tale.
Creepy, and very well written. Think shades of Joanna Trollope at her family drama best, blended with Shirley Jackson noir.
My rating: 7.5/10.
Leaves & Pages 
Is this one of her last books?I think i read and disliked it years ago.My favourite is ANGEL IN THE CORNER.
Monica Dickens is one of my favorite writers, but I had no idea she wrote suspense. Where have I been? I’ve found many of her e-books at Bloomsbury Reader and will have to see if they’ve published this one.