You Like My Mother — Naomi Hintze

She is twenty-one. Her husband has been killed in Vietnam, and her baby is due in three weeks. Alienated from her family, without money, all she has are the reassuring words of her dead husband: “You'll like my mother.”

And so Francesca Kingsolving, hot, tired, very vulnerable, and very pregnant, travels to the tiny Ohio town where her mother-in-law lives. It doesn't matter that Mrs. Matthew Kinsolving has never answered her telegram or letters.

Francesca has only to set eyes on the elder Mrs. Kinsolving's huge, dark graystone house to feel a twing of fear, a foreboding magnified by the ominous presence of the tall, ivory-haired woman who comes to the door. The eyes that regard Francesca are a curious pale gray, almost colorless. And the greeting she extends to her daughter-in-law is cold and unfriendly. Beyond the threshold another figure cowers against the wall: a babbling, feebleminded girl with wild dark hair whom the older woman present as Francesca's sister-in-law.

For Francesca it is an introduction to terror. For the reader it is the beginning of a trip along the knife-edge of suspense that gives shuddering new dimension to the contemporary Gothic.

She unlocked the door of my room…
…and came in. There was a hypodermic in her hand. I was too weak to fight her. She jammed the needle into my arm with sadistic fervor

I could hear the wind and rain outside. I knew the river was rising. It would be flooding soon. I could hear a heavy knocking against the front door. Then a voice calling. A man's voice.
She went over to the window and looked out.
“Yes?”
I heard a voice shout, “Is everybody all right out here, Mrs. Kinsolving?”
“Yes. Yes, we're all right.”
I sat up, pushed back my sweat-plastered hair. I started trying to get out of bed, clinging to the foot of it. I could hear another voice down there now. If was Red, the young bus driver who had brought me her. “Mrs. Kinsolving,” Red called, “that girl who came out here yesterday -- “
Mrs. Kinsolving said in her loud, flat voice, “She has gone. I drove her back to the motel last night.”
I was on my feet swaying. “Red -- Red!” I shouted hoarsely.
She slammed the window down and pushed me back. “They've left,” she said. “Now go to sleep.”