On my first day as a Circuit Court judicial clerk, the judge looked at me and said, “Jodie Foster called. She’s missing her twin sister.” I laughed it off—I didn’t quite see the resemblance—but it was a nice compliment because I greatly admired Foster and her work.
So what does this years-old incident have to do with the TV series True Detective: Night Country and my newly released novel The Medici Curse, a Gothic thriller set amid the opulent beauty of Tuscany? Well, Jody Foster stars in Night Country, and both that series and Medici cross genres by incorporating supernatural elements.
Night Country drops the viewer into the fictional town of Ennis, Alaska. Eight scientists vanish from a remote research station, and detectives Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) and Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis) are tasked with solving the mystery. When the bodies of all but one of the men are found on the tundra, naked and frozen in bizarre poses, the ominous mystery-solving puzzle begins. In Medici, Anna de’ Medici returns to her ancestral villa in Tuscany to settle her late mother’s affairs sixteen years after her demise. Blamed for her mother’s death during a dispute over a cursed Medici heirloom necklace, Anna has, since she was twelve years old, grappled with fragmented memories from that horrible night.
At first glance, these stories couldn’t sound more different. Yet in both works, setting plays a crucial—and similar—role by creating a sense of isolation. As Danvers searches for answers, Alaska’s remoteness frays the nerves of its inhabitants while odd occurrences misshape reality. Everyone’s version of the truth differs. In Medici, the Tuscan villa, grand, immaculate, and devoid of any other occupants, underscores Anna’s loneliness and separation from others. The two locations, though vastly different, are traps, creating tension and suspense that cause the characters to question their mental stability—and that make the viewer wonder what is real. The setting in Gothic thrillers is an essential element and becomes a character.
The stories have another similarity: the protagonists must solve mysteries to save themselves emotionally (and perhaps physically). Danver struggles with suppressed trauma and unresolved grief from the loss of her son. At the same time, she’s haunted by her complicity in the killing of a suspect. Now, she has to figure out what happened to the missing scientist not simply to uphold the law but also to regain her sanity. Everything around her seems to be distorted, out of the ordinary. Even her partner, Navarro, abandons rational thought and insists that the answers lie in the restless spirit of Annie K., an activist who was murdered because she knew too much.
Likewise, in Medici Anna lives with a terrible stigma—the belief that as a child, she killed her mother during an episode of night terrors in order to steal the Medici Falchion, a cursed heirloom necklace. In her quest to learn the truth about that fateful night, scars from her past resurface. Strange insects plague her, visions and eerie sounds emanate from within the walls of the villa and its basement, and a locked dungeon door beckons. Anna is certain of one thing: she must find and destroy the necklace to regain any equilibrium in her life, and like Danvers, only the truth will allow her to find this peace.
Both Night Country and Medici are dark thrillers with blurred boundaries, both infuse Gothic elements—dread, fear, doom, and death—and both narratives hint strongly at the supernatural. Part two delves deeper into the mystical and how thriller writers successfully blend genres.
