“Why do you always want to watch such dark movies?” a former boyfriend once asked me. It was a fair question. The last two movies I had made him watch involved a kidnapping and a former military officer killing his wife and going insane.
To me, movies involving murder and mayhem were just another Friday. I never realized other people didn’t share my morbid fascination with the darker sides of humanity.
I’m a true crime junkie. My first introduction to the genre was Unsolved Mysteries. Robert Stack’s distinctive baritone still brings me back to elementary school sleepovers in the 90s. Though the show often terrified me, I was captivated by the grisly murder plots, missing people, malevolent ghosts, mysterious crop circles. On Unsolved Mysteries, Big Foot trampled through the Pacific Northwest, psychics channeled your long lost dead uncle, Mother Mary statues miraculously cured cancer. The offbeat and outlandish existed alongside the ordinary.
My morbid curiosity continues today.
Every year, I go down a rabbit hole about the Jon Benet Case.
The eerie electric theme song of Forensic Files is as comforting as a lullaby.
I listen to Mr. Ballen’s podcast religiously.
I devotedly watch domestic thrillers and 1940s film noir movies.
So you can imagine my pleasure at discovering Celia Dale’s sinister A Spring of Love this past week. Known as the queen of suburban horror, Dale often explored the darker sides of domesticity. Though of the same caliber as masters of suspense Patricia Highsmith and Daphne du Maurier, today Dale is largely relegated to obscurity. By the time of her death in 2011, her books had fallen out of print. But thanks to Daunt books, A Spring of Love was reissued in 2024 and introduced to a new readership.
The novel follows Esther, a shy single woman of thirty, who has resigned herself to spinsterhood. She’s not exactly happy, but she’s not unhappy either. Esther leads a narrow life, circumscribed by routine: each day she goes to work at a local department store and each evening she returns home to Gran, her grandmother. Their uneventful lives consist of watching TV and drinking tea. The only disruption to this predictable pattern is when Esther takes herself out to the cinema every Thursday, but even that becomes just another one of her routines.
Nothing distinguishes one day from the next, that is until one Thursday she meets Raymond Banks.
Chatty and charming, Raymond asks Esther to borrow her newspaper. Not used to male attention, Esther is hesitant at first, but she eventually falls for him. After a few months, they’re engaged. Gran is ecstatic about the engagement, having mostly given up on the idea of her reclusive granddaughter ever finding a husband. Raymond absolutely charms Gran, showering her with compliments and thoughtful gifts. These two lonely women are so desperate for love that they ignore his countless red flags.
What makes Dale so masterful is how she finds menace in the most mundane settings. In her novels, the monstrous intrudes on the home, what should be the embodiment of security and safety. Beaver to Cleaver domestic life conceals lies, betrayal, deceit. The people you love most—your husband—are the people you should most fear. The sinister and strange are found in the familiar. As anyone who watches true crime will tell you, you’re far more likely to be killed by someone you know than a stranger.
Dale deftly draws her characters. Hungry for any sort of affection after a lifetime alone, Esther is undyingly loyal to Raymond, a man she barely knows. Half the time I was reading, I wanted to shake Esther and scream, “Your husband’s using you, bitch!”
As someone on the outside of their marriage looking in, it’s easy to hear alarm bells ringing in the distance. Not only is Raymond controlling and quick to anger, he has an unbridled contempt for women. When he asks to be granted access to Esther’s bank accounts and insists they write wills, we begin to wonder if he’s after more than just her hand in marriage. Esther is a scammer’s wet dream: financially secure, naive, trusting. After her beloved grandfather’s death, she inherited both the family home and the family business.
In A Spring of Love, there is a drastic divide between the characters’ and the reader’s knowledge. While Esther finds nothing suspicious about the fact that she’s never once met Raymond’s aunt, the woman who supposedly raised him, the reader begins to wonder if she even exists and if Raymond really is who he says he is. Esther never questions why her husband always travels for work, but the reader suspects he is doing something more sinister when he is away on “business.”
The novel derives its suspense from this tension. In a brilliant 1992 interview, novelist Donna Tartt explains, “Suspense doesn’t come from a bomb thrown from nowhere…suspense comes from having two people sitting talking at a table, there’s a bomb ticking underneath the table.” Throughout A Spring of Love, Dale plants bomb after bomb about Raymond: while Esther mostly remains oblivious, we wait for them to detonate, our jaws clenched in anxious anticipation.
It’s easy to judge Esther but we must not forget she—like the rest of us—is immersed in her own story, she’s restricted to her own perspective. It’s harder for her to objectively assess her own situation. Her longing for love makes it impossible to see the truth about Raymond. Like many women who find themselves in toxic relationships, Esther consistently rationalizes her husband’s bad behavior and is quick to forgive him. “He had a tough upbringing. He was abandoned by his mother,” she justifies often.
To see Raymond for who he really is would require Esther to completely rewrite her narrative of him. In her narrative, her and Raymond’s marriage is the portrait of domestic bliss. Raymond is quite literally her knight and shining armor, the man who rescues her from her dreary existence. He’s a considerate, charming, if somewhat troubled, man, but her love (she believes) will change him. If she had to acknowledge that something was deeply wrong with her husband, she’d have to leave—and return to her quiet, lonely life with Gran.
But at the end of the novel, she finds herself thrust into an entirely different narrative. Her and Raymond’s story isn’t one of love or redemption—it’s a spine-chilling true crime special of a swindling con artist.
However, A Spring of Love is not just about one person deceiving another—it’s about the many ways we deceive ourselves. Esther’s unsettling tale suggests there’s a thin line between devotion and delusion. So devoted is she to the story that Raymond is the perfect husband that she’ll ignore anything that contradicts it.