I recently read Stephen King's new novel, Billy Summers, and was intrigued by the incidental fact that Billy was reading a novel by Émile Zola called Thérèse Raquin. King never describes the novel, but he mentions it several times, as if inviting you to take a look at it for yourself, So, I did.
Review
If you distilled Thérèse Raquin down to its essential plot points, you could almost turn it into an EC horror comic. Thérèse, through no agency of her own, is married to a sickly, boring young man named Camille. One day, Camille makes the mistake of introducing his wife to a robust, virile former schoolmate of his named Laurent, In time, Thérèse and Laurent become attracted to each other and begin to have an affair behind Camille's back. Eventually, they decide Camille is the one thing keeping them from complete happiness, so they plot his murder. The murder itself is played out in horrific, violent detail as Laurent drowns Camille in the Seine while Thérèse watches.
The lovers succeed in making the murder look like a boating accident, preempting any suspicions of foul play. Since it takes a while for the body to turn up because it had been pushed down into the current, Laurent takes to visiting the morgue each day, hoping to identify the body and help the police close the case. These visits, described in chapter thirteen, turn into a bit of Grand Guignol as Zola describes the corpses in vivid detail. We learn, along the way, that visiting the morgue is an entertainment for many.
Sometimes gangs of small boys came in, mere children of twelve to fifteen. who rushed along the windows and only stopped in front of female corpses. They leaned on the glass with their hands and ran their impudent eyes over the bare breasts, nudging each other and passing smutty remarks, learning vice in the school of death. Young louts have their first women in the Morgue.
With Camille finally buried and their crime unsuspected, the lovers decide to avoid each other's embraces for a while to further divert any thought that they might have had anything to do with it. They depend on mutual friends to ultimately suggest that perhaps the two of them should get together, which was also part of the plan all along. But each of them has become haunted by guilty visions of Camille's corpse. By the time they are joined in matrimony, each is repulsed by the other, and they are no longer able to experience the pleasure they felt when they were together illicitly. What follows is a gradual descent into hallucinatory madness, physical abuse, and vicious recriminations. The final paragraph of this nasty little novel is a masterpiece of degradation and spite that would, as I indicated earlier, have been at home in a pre-Code horror comic.
I have, of course, left out important developments and characters in this short summary, but it should be enough to let you decide if this is the sort of thing that interests you. I found the first half of the novel to be compelling reading, but it began to drag in the second half as the author prolonged the suffering of the two lovers. Nevertheless, I admired the unflinching way Zola examined the motives of his characters. In the beginning, when Thérèse falls for Laurent, Zola makes it clear that she does so for the physical pleasure of sex -- there's no mincing of words here. Even Laurent is a bit frightened at first by how much she enjoys it.
Reactions to this novel are fairly mixed. In its day is was famously described as "putrid" by one critic. While Zola held it up as a study in naturalism based on the interplay of character types, the novel is definitely overheated and "over the top" in all sorts of ways. Others have pointed out the similarities to Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart. While I don't see any similarities to Billy Summers, I can certainly see why Uncle Stevie thought Thérèse Raquin worth bringing to his readers' awareness.
