A Cry in the Night was published by Simon & Schuster in 1982, and it represents Clark at her most Gothic — a novel that owes as much to Rebecca and Jane Eyre as to the thriller genre, exploring how a woman can find herself trapped in a marriage that is simultaneously her rescue and her prison.
Jenny MacPartland is a young divorced mother working at a New York art gallery when she meets Erich Krueger — a celebrated artist from Minnesota, handsome, wealthy, charming, and apparently devoted. They marry quickly (too quickly, as the reader suspects) and move to Erich’s remote farm, where Jenny finds herself isolated from friends, family, and any independent source of information.
Clark builds dread through accumulation: small things are wrong. Erich’s dead mother’s room is preserved as a shrine. The farmhands are deferential in ways that feel like fear. Jenny’s children begin behaving strangely. And Erich’s charm — so overwhelming in New York — reveals itself on the farm as something else: possessiveness, jealousy, and a need for control that escalates from attentiveness to surveillance to confinement.
The novel is Clark’s most psychologically acute: rather than an external threat, the danger comes from within the marriage itself — from the discovery that the man who rescued you is also the man who is destroying you, and that the love he professes is indistinguishable from the desire to possess.
Collecting A Cry in the Night
First edition (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1982): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $15–$40
- Signed first edition: $35–$80
- Without jacket: $5–$10