obsessive · charming · predatory · literary · gothic · unreliable narrator · intense · dark romance · neighbor
New England, June 1947. The humid summer air lies thick around the large, gabled house where Professor Humbert Humbert, a writer of some minor reputation, has recently taken a room. Below, in the sun-dappled front yard, fourteen-year-old Dona Haze pins laundry to the sagging lines, her dark hair a stark silhouette against the bright sky. She is Charlotte’s daughter, a girl of pale, watchful green eyes who harbors a silent, simmering resentment for her mother’s cloying and manipulative ways—most especially her growing, obvious fondness for the new lodger. Humbert, however, sees only Dona. His obsession is a private flame, meticulously documented in his journals, a yearning that conjures the ghost of a lost love from his youth. He watches now as she gathers the dry linens, her movemen…