A review by octavia_cade
The Castle of the Carpathians by Jules Verne

3.0

This is the most enjoyable of Verne's novels I've read so far! (Granted, I've only read a handful but this surpasses The Survivors of the Chancellor for sheer trash entertainment value.) It's also, for about 95% of it, a genre that I would never have expected of Verne. I'm used to him writing science fiction or even general fiction with various levels of pedantry - sorry, but you know it's true. Give the man a screw or a valve to write about and he could bore for France. But this is sheer gothic romance all the way through... except it isn't romance, because there's a scientific twist near the end which sucks the romance right out of it, and I say that with love, because the twist was pretty damn great.

I do enjoy books that cause me to stop and think about the shelves I'll end up putting them on, if only because my biologist self has an unreasonable love for classification. And when I read gothic romance I shelve it under "horror" and "romance" because to me that's gothic romance cut down to its constituent parts and it is redundancy to have a "gothic romance" shelf on top of that. But, as I said... the romance here is subject to twistiness, and it's not a real romance at all. It's just this fake-out gothic horror and I am delighted. Hence the shelving, for a gothic romance that is not.