The Plague Stone

The Plague Stone / Gillian White 
London: Phoenix, 1996, c1990.
320 p.

Another oddball book that I picked up in a thrift store, drawn in by the cover and the series. This is the first book I've read by this author, and I won't be looking for her further work! 

It's called The Plague Stone for the looming presence of this landmark in the middle of the village of Meadcombe, a hulking rock wound about with legends of black magic from the past. 

There are three women in this book - Marian, Sonia and Melanie. Each has a dilemma and on one dark night, they all wish for change on the Plague Stone. Their wishes are granted, but is it coincidence or something darker? That's the question of this book, and it seems speculative and philosophical until it isn't, rather it's something quite real - this change in the tone and expectations from beginning to end was unsettling as a reader, and I don't think it quite worked. I was left wondering what actually happened here. 

Marian is a widow, left to care for her aged mother-in-law, a nasty woman at the best of times who is now suffering from dementia as well. Marian just wishes that the old woman would die already and free her from this burden. 

Sonia is used to being a wealthy woman, and has to beg her father-in-law for a loan to save her husband's business. How she goes about it makes her cringe the next day. 

And Melanie is a teenager full of angst and goth tendencies, who can't stand her self-martyred mother and depressed, self-focused father. She just wishes to get out of the village. And she does; she disappears, setting off the rest of the drama. 

The dark centre of the book is Melanie's mother Janey, a woman obsessed with the idea that everyone around her belongs to a devilish cult, and they've stolen Melanie away. She is very wrong, but as it turns out, right in one small way. In any case, everyone else has their own issues they are dealing with and aren't as focused on Melanie as Janey wants them to be. She's known to be a problem teen and most locals assume she ran away (for understandable reasons). Janey, however, spirals into deeper delusion, even as no-one around her seems to notice. 

This leads to the shocking and abrupt conclusion. I didn't see this coming, or, if I did I couldn't quite believe the author would go there. Melanie returns at the end, too late to do anything, and she and her grandmother (who she had in actually run away to) are not what you might have expected or foreseen. It's a strange tale, more violent that I'd expected, and left me unsatisfied with the ending; the build up of the events in the story seem pointless in light of the ending. It sticks in the mind, but perhaps not for the best reasons.