SOURCE: "Gothic Arch," in Village Voice, Vol. 30, June 25, 1995, p. 47.

Below, Stone criticizes Blackwood's plot and character development in Corrigan.

Caroline Blackwood tends to see human relationships as sick jokes. Her novels are variations on The Defiant Ones, full of contrary types unhappily shackled together: a philandering rogue and his pathologically passive wife; a secretly raging woman and her belligerent, obese stepdaughter; a watchful 14-year-old and her rich, miserly great-grandmother, a gargoyle who flourishes the best silver for a dinner of canned spaghetti. Along with a number of other British writers—Beryl Bainbridge, Bernice Rubens, and Emma Tennant come to mind—Blackwood reaps startling insights by telling gothic stories (about murders, closeted skeletons, false identities) using a psychologically probing voice.

The technique is in place in Corrigan, her latest novel. Devina Blunt, the Colonel's widow, is wasting to a frizzle of grief in a remote Wiltshire village. Every day...