DARK SHADOWS

JENNIFER EGAN SPINS A HAUNTING TALE

In many ways, The Keep (Knopf), Jennifer Egan's gothic novel within a prison novel, mimics the mysterious and claustrophobic castle where much of the story unfolds. Full of disturbingly dark corridors and secret passageways, the narrative shifts between Danny, an ill-fated hipster who has traveled to Eastern Europe to help his long-estranged cousin, Howard, transform his castle into a Luddite hotel, and Ray, a prison inmate who is the one actually £ writing the castle tale (which he insists was told to him by another man) in the desperate hope of forging a bond with * the enigmatic woman who leads the Big House's writing workshop. Egan's brilliance is in balancing the deliciously " creepy elements of gothic-castle novels (there's a mad baroness in a tower and a treacly pool where a pair of 2 twins drowned) with the dead-on realism of a prisoner's life, to create a book worth keeping.

E. S.