A Great, Good Place for Ghosts and Girls: Queer Love and Death in All the Dead Lie Down

I was first drawn to this book by the title on its spine. All the Dead Lie Down jumped out at me like a plea to be read. The title is provocative and surprising, and I was ready. I pulled it off the shelf and there on the cover was the drawing of a girl with a long blond braid tangled with small skeletons into the roots and leaves of a wild snaking ivy overlooked by a luminescent full moon. A faint outline of another girl with darker hair hides behind the tangling mess of plant, hair and bone. She has a faint smile and has her eyes closed. It is a haunting and memorable cover, beautiful in its artistry and exactly the aesthetic I love. Morbid, boney and twisted, a bit like me. 

This was my first impression of this book. It called from my bookshelf and when I finally did pick it up, I was surprised and then surprised again. It begins in a familiar Gothic manner: a young woman is brought to a mansion where she finds things are not as they seem, and they are more macabre than she could have imagined. Initially, it reminded me of Henry James’ The Turn of The Screw, in which a governess arrives at an estate to find two strange children haunted by the death of a parent and ghosts. In All The Dead Lie Down, after the death of her mother, Marin Blythe receives a call from famous and reclusive writer Alice Lovelace who offers her a job as a nanny to her two young daughters. Marin journeys from California to the coast of Maine, where she finds Lovelace House, a big, old house replete with dark corridors, antique furniture, a full library and many secrets. 

All the Dead Lie Down is a love story, at its core. Two young women, brought together by unknown and estranged family ties and a mutual understanding of what love is.

There is no shame around their queerness, it is almost a given in the old mansion by the sea.

It is usual. Kylie McCauley has created a magical world where two young women marked by death can come together and love each other without judgement or fear. It is a special place they live in, almost separate from time. 

In a tree in an orchard under a full moon, Evie and Marin clasp hands and breathe each other’s air. Hands intertwined, their lips magnets. The cinnamon of Evie’s perfume permeates the starlit air. And then, Evie jumps down from the tree and runs away. 

“They were close enough that Marin could smell the cinnamon scent Evie always wore and make out the faint blush on Evie’s cheeks.

Evie brushed a hand over Marin’s cheek.

‘That’s Leo,’ she said, ‘The lion.’

‘And Ursa Minor over here,’ Evie said. Her fingers dropped to Marin’s collarbone, where another thousand or so freckles led a path up and over her shoulder.

She was finding constellations in Marin’s freckles. 

Then Evie’s dark gaze dropped to Marin’s lips. ‘What was it?’

‘Snow White’s Folly. What did she ever do wrong?” Evie moved a fraction of an inch closer, and without thought or hesitation, Marin responded in kind.

‘I don’t know,’ Marin answered truthfully. “I guess she just… trusted the wrong people.”

Evie shifted away so quickly that Marin almost lost her balance.

‘We can’t do this,’ Evie said.

Marin was so confused.

‘We didn’t… Evie, we didn’t do anything.”

Evie muttered some excuse about needing to go. It was half-hearted and inane, and Marin saw right through the crystalline lie, but Evie was already climbing down the apple tree, crouching on the lowest branch to grab it with her hands and swing down to the dewey grass below.

Marin leaned against the tree trunk, pulling Evie’s sweater in closer around her body, and watched as Evie fled.”

~All the Dead Lie Down, p. 139-140

We queer readers feel for her, we understand her, because we’ve been there. We know how it feels to want something so badly but desperately wish we didn’t. We see ourselves in Evie, internalized homophobia disallowing us to do the things that feel right. But things are not as they seem. Evie does not feel ashamed because she is falling in love with Marin, a twist, she feels ashamed because she thinks she is unlovable because of her abilities. Her involuntary necromancy takes the place of internalized homophobia. And, of course, Marin doesn’t care about Evie’s ability when she eventually learns of it. Marin loves Evie for everything that she is, despite and because of the death surrounding them all.

In this isolated world where the dead come back to life, a queer love story can flourish. 

One day, the youngest girl Marin cares for and Evie’s youngest sister, Thea, goes to visit the caretaker. When they discover that the caretaker, Mr. Willoughby, has not seen the little girl, they begin to search the forest. They find her in a clearing reaching towards a large deer. 

“And then Marin stepped on a branch, snapping it beneath her. The deer turned in her direction, and Marin saw what Evie had seen. 

The deer’s entire face was gone. Only its skull remained, blanched pearl white from the sun; it was eyeless, lifeless, and only inches from Thea’s face.

Marin’s eyes swept the rest of the deer, noting the places where its flesh had been ripped away. In the cavities, Marin could see glimpses of muscles and bone but also wispy tendrils of ivy, growing through the decaying skin of the creature, making the shiny swell of its liver look like a blooming flower in the greenery. Its intestines hung like pink velvet ribbons from its soft torn belly, nearly dragging on the ground.”

~ All the Dead Lie Down, p. 219

Yes, it’s vivid and gruesome. It’s magical and like nothing I’ve read before. Death made beautiful. It reveals the gory and unjust side of the romanticized idea of necromancy. Often, necromancy is performed on things that have just died, or the presentation in literature is not about the death of a creature and what comes when breath leaves a body, but about what that creature does, or who the creature hunts. This image is fantastical and haunting, and I absolutely fell in love with the macabre  beauty of it all. 

Marin and Evie find a place where they can both feel useful, assured and loved. They create a family after the death of Alice, raising Evie’s little sisters, Wren and Thea, in a less isolated way, sending them to school off-property, a big step for the Lovelace’s who have been raised to reject the outside world. Marin and Evie relax into a life that might seem impossible still in many places, but that is comfortable and lovely in the big house on the craggy cliffs of the Maine coast.

Lovelace House is a world unto itself. In this world, women fall in love and a deathly magic soaks into the soil. Evangeline Lovelace does carry shame, but not about who she loves. Just being around Evie can jumpstart a heart. It is pervasive, insidious, and is starting to affect animals in the surrounding woods… Until Marin arrives, and the love that grows between them in the solitude of this “great, good place” by the sea brings the family back to life.