It doesn't take long to find out why the inn and its landlord are so feared. This is going to be a journey into darkness, and it's going to deliver both violence and sensation. By the end of the first day, as the light bleeds away and Mary barricades herself in her miserable little room, a pact has been made with the reader. The lovely giggling Aunt Patience is now a gaunt, shaky wreck, her spirit destroyed by abuse, and her husband, Joss Merlyn, is a monster: physically overwhelming, lumbering, violent and drunk. Inside, the place reeks of neglect, drink and male violence. At night the sign outside twists in the wind like a human body on a gibbet. Mary's destination, Jamaica Inn, stands dark and forbidding at the top of the moor. We are in the territory of the gothic novel, but one with an undercurrent of modern sensibility. Inside rides Mary Yellan, newly orphaned and en route from the tame farmland of the Helford area to the rainswept moors of nineteenth-century Cornwall and the married home of her aunt, a woman once known for her rich curls and girlish laughter. Jamaica Inn opens with echoes of Dracula: a carriage rattling through a desolate landscape and wild weather to a place where even the locals won't go, so ferocious is its reputation.
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