Jennifer Thorne made quite an impression with Diavola, turning family dysfunction, Italian sunshine and supernatural horror into one very bad holiday. Now she’s back with Newbourne Park, swapping the Tuscan getaway for 200 acres of extremely expensive English countryside.
Worn out from years of caregiving, 26-year-old Martha Shaw reluctantly agrees to a secret weekend escape at a lavish country estate. It sounds idyllic enough. Then the rightful master of the house returns under cover of night, and Martha finds herself fighting for survival against a vicious, hungry presence stalking the grounds.
A deliciously nasty collision of Gothic horror and class warfare, Newbourne Park gives the werewolf myth a distinctly contemporary makeover. Thorne turns familiar tropes inside out to ask whether escaping the food chain is quite the same thing as refusing to join it.
To celebrate the book’s release (September 29), CinemaChords spoke to Thorne about class and privilege colliding with Gothic nightmares, the appeal of placing an utterly contemporary protagonist inside an old-fashioned horror story — and the fun of taking familiar Gothic and werewolf trappings and giving them a thoroughly nasty twist.