WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE

a review by Janna McMahan

It would be challenging to read Diane Chamberlain’s work and not think, I never knew that Her reflective stories expose impactful, yet often overlooked, connections between our past and how we live today. Such is the case in her recent novels, The Last House on the Street and Big Lies in a Small Town, both critical and commercial successes. Generally, Chamberlain’s work isn’t classified as historical fiction; rather, she uses history to elevate the genre of domestic suspense. A hallmark of domestic suspense is characters caught in uncomfortable situations like bad marriages, unhappy work lives, and houses or towns where they feel threatened. Check. Other elements are a fast-paced timeline and rising tension right up to the denouement. Check and check.

In both The Last House on the Street and Big Lies in a Small Town, Chamberlain once again proves herself the master of dual timelines. Readers wonder at how the disparate storylines, set decades apart, will collide. Chamberlain deftly blends multiple narratives to reveal a larger worldview. The Last House on the Street, for example, will resonate with those concerned with disenfranchisement and the current push for voting restrictions. Perhaps this is one of the reasons this book was chosen for the Goodreads list of most popular historical novels of 2022 – a true compliment as Goodreads members are dedicated and discerning readers.

In The Last House on the Street, Kayla Carter is a successful architect, grieving widow, and dedicated mother to her three-year-old daughter. Her husband is tragically killed in a freak accident in their nearly completed modern home at the end of a lonely road. Kayla must decide if she can endure the heartache and raise her daughter there. It had been their dream home and she’s hesitant to let go, but common sense dictates she sell and move to a more manageable house in a populated area.

This novel opens in 2010 in Kayla’s Round Hill, NC, architecture firm. An aggressive older woman with bright red hair and sunglasses that obscure her face shows up unexpectedly. Thinking she could have simply forgotten the woman’s appointment, Kayla graciously lets her in, but the meeting quickly takes a threatening turn. The woman brings up Kayla’s husband’s death and suggests their young daughter shouldn’t be raised in such an isolated house. When the woman threatens physical violence Kayla demands she leave.

Kayla’s house is new construction at the end of an old established street. It backs up to dense woods and the floor to ceiling windows that were meant to bring in natural light and provide a view now make Kayla feel exposed and vulnerable. When vandals target her house, Kayla is so rattled she asks her father to stay with her. He seems to have some latent knowledge of the woods and lake behind her home, but tightlipped on the subject, he leaves Kayla to wonder if he knows why her property has the reputation of being haunted.

Kayla befriends her next door neighbors, the Hockleys, an established Round Hill family still living in the only original house on the street. They are holdouts who won’t sell their property to developers, and readers ponder their potential animosity toward those moving to their formerly secluded street. Kayla also makes a stronger connection when she meets Ellie Hockley, who has come from California to care for her mother and brother.

Readers are introduced to a young Ellie in a parallel narrative set in 1965. She’s a pharmacology student at UNC Chapel Hill planning to follow her father into his pharmacy business. She’s all but engaged to a handsome bank manager. But Ellie is itching for more. Spurred by a civil rights protest on the UNC campus, Ellie becomes interested in volunteering to register black voters in anticipation of the passage of the Voting Rights Act, ignoring warnings from family and friends about the potential for violence her volunteering could inspire. Her family is also concerned about how her support for voting rights for black folks could socially impact their standing in the community. Ellie believes in “the rightness” of what she wants to do, but she runs into a roadblock when she learns the policy of The Summer Community Organization and Political Education Program (SCOPE) is to bus students from Northern uni- versities, not to take Southern students.

Ellie appeals to a local AME preacher who reluctantly backs her application. She slips away from her summer job at the pharmacy and leaves behind her romance to attend training. It is possible Ellie is using this experience more as an adventure than as a passionate social gesture, particularly when she is disappointed to be sent back to her home county to canvass rather than to the Deep South to register voters as she had anticipated.

The program pairs her with a local black family, and while living with these people Ellie realizes that her life, though only a short distance down the road, is a world away. She experiences a reality of sleeping multiple people to a bedroom and how to make do without conveniences she had always taken for granted. When violence visits her host family she is terrified and realizes her presence might be detrimental to her hosts. At every turn, SCOPE students are thwarted by anger and violence and the black families brave enough to be hosts often pay a high price. As Ellie awakens to the disparities and challenges these families face in her own town, she becomes truly committed to the cause, even as her heart urges caution. She’s learned she is an idealist when she needs to be a realist.

Race relations is an issue Chamberlain visited in previous novels (Necessary Lies, 2013 and The Stolen Marriage, 2017). When the author was fourteen, she was horrified watching the news about the brutal murders of three young civil rights workers, two white and one African American, in Mississippi. As a New Jersey native, Chamberlain attended an integrated junior high school at the time of the murders. She realized these “freedom fighters” working with SCOPE were no different than her school friends: “It was the first time their work had an emotional and intellectual impact on me,” Chamberlain explains of the SCOPE program.* This opened her eyes to the injustices faced by people who looked like her classmates, but she also realized students could be a force for positive change.

As Kayla and an older Ellie form a tenuous friendship, strange things begin to happen in Kayla’s life. Kayla is frantic when her daughter disappears. When construction workers from a nearby site identify a woman with bright red hair walking into the woods with the little girl, Kayla knows it is same woman who threatened her. Who is this woman and why is she obsessed with Kayla, her daughter, and their home? As Kayla figures out the mystery, readers question if her husband’s death was an accident after all. What lengths would this woman go to in order to keep secrets buried?

More than half of Chamberlain’s novels are set in her adopted state of North Carolina. While The Last House on the Street is set in a fictional town, Big Lies in a Small Town is set in picturesque Edenton, located in the northern part of the state along an inland sound inside the Outer Banks.

It’s 1940 and alone in the world after her mother’s untimely death, Anna Dale enters a WPA mural contest. Desperate for money and purpose, Anna is delighted to be selected. Her enthusiasm is dampened when she learns she will be painting a post office mural in a tiny North Carolina town. Born and raised in New Jersey, Anna has common prejudices about the South and is hesitant to visit a place she might not fit in.

But go she does and immediately senses something amiss in Edenton, a tension that goes deeper than a suspicion of outsiders or the fact that many residents thought the mural should have been awarded to their local male artist. Anna wants to make the town proud and spends her early days delving into local history looking for subject matter. The men who run Edenton pressure her with suggestions for themes for the mural. Wanting to complete the project as quickly as possible, Anna employs the assistance of three local high school students. As two volunteers step away, only a young black man stays to help. This seems to be the last straw with locals who don’t cotton to a young white woman being alone, often at night, with a black student.

In a seemingly unconnected narrative, it is 2019 and Morgan Christopher is doing time for a crime she didn’t commit. She’s had a rough life growing up with dismissive alcoholic parents. Even her love interest who had been driving drunk left her to take the fall for an accident that paralyzed someone. Although Morgan wasn’t behind the wheel, guilt that she could have done more to prevent the crash gnaws at her. With a couple of years left on her sentence, Morgan is surprised when two strangers offer her an out. She had been an art student before prison, and they explain that if she will come to Edenton to oversee the restoration of a mural she will gain her freedom and earn fifty thousand dollars. Morgan gladly accepts the assignment. With an ankle monitor to track her, she sets up shop in what is to be Edenton’s stunning new art gallery. She is to restore an uncompleted mural from the WPA program by an artist named Anna Dale, which will be prominently featured in the gallery’s lobby. Since Morgan has no background in art restoration, she learns as she works. As she meticulously repairs and cleans the painting she sees the mural’s story develop with mystifying images incongruent with what one would expect. What was the story that Anna Dale was trying to convey? Morgan doesn’t perceive the uplifting, productive themes common with other WPA murals emerging. In fact, the more paint Morgan uncovers the more disturbing the story becomes – violence, mental illness and collusion – clues to secrets Edenton has hidden for decades. Morgan’s benefactor turns out to be a nationally recognized African American artist who wanted those images uncovered and displayed in time for the gal- lery’s opening. His posthumous largesse would expose truths about Edenton and the disappearance of Anna Dale, who was rumored to have lost her mind during the project. Morgan becomes obsessed with finding out what happened to Anna Dale, but with time ticking down to the gallery opening, she can’t get distracted. And more personally, why was Morgan selected to do this restoration work? Is there a connection she’s not seeing?

Chamberlain’s characters are ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. Her female protagonists solve mysteries while pushing back against established systems of oppression. Her characters balk at state-sanctioned social ills like entrenched expectations of marriage and motherhood, obstacles to interracial relationships and the ever-present inequality women and minorities face. She writes of women discovering their voices while finding their paths, of families and friendships, and foremost, of accepting mistakes and moving toward peace when the world isn’t kind or even reasonable. n