Donyae Coles offers readers a fairy tale--of both the romantic and horrific variety--in Midnight Rooms, a chilling and fantastical work of historical fiction.
Orphaned at a young age, 26-year-old Orabella has long been in the care of her aunt and uncle, a wealthy Bristol family whose status in society is not enough to land their mixed-race niece an offer of marriage. Until one day, when a stranger appears and asks for her hand--an opportunity her uncle sees as an end to his gambling debts. Despite her reservations--she does not know this man, nor anything of his family--she sees no real choice but to accept. "What she wanted from her situation was secondary to the fact that it was her situation." Orabella is rapidly pulled out of her current life and into a new one, wed to the strange Mr. Elias Blakersby and off to his family's estate in the countryside within a day.
Up to this point, Midnight Rooms reads a bit like a work of historical romance: orphaned girl finds refuge in the arms of a kind stranger and sets out for a new life of happily-ever-after. But upon their arrival at the estate, Orabella discovers that her happy ending may not be so happy after all. "Korringhill Manor towered with an obvious prestige but lacked all pretense of leisure, of joy. Not a place that people lived in, instead it had the feel of a place that people couldn't leave." Her first impression of the place proves true across the following pages of Coles's gripping novel. Thrust into a lavish world, Orabella is plied with honey wine and wakes from dreams that feel impossibly real. She's surrounded by relatives of questionable humanity and never allowed to be alone except when locked in her bedroom each night.
In Midnight Rooms, Coles turns the typical fairy tale upside down and inside out and back again. The novel shifts to something like a fever dream, as Orabella's visions of her life in the manor dissolve inside what seems to be a "court of fairies and monsters." Therein lies the confusion of Midnight Rooms, and in it, a dark mystery unravelling across its pages--what is Orabella's imagination, and what is real? What is a memory and what is a dream? What can be believed? With vivid and gory detail, Midnight Rooms is a genre-spanning work of history and horror, fantasy and fairy tale, that pulses with a dark energy from start to unsettling finish. --Kerry McHugh, freelance writer
Shelf Talker: A genre-spanning work of historical fiction and horror imagines a fairy tale romance turned nightmarish terror as a young bride tries to understand the family she's married into.