This Wine Slaps: Sisters of the Crimson Vine
A little horror novella soaked in wine? Yes, please!
This week we’re chatting about P.L McMillan’s Sisters of the Crimson Vine.
Here’s the thing…when I was hunting for some Catholic horror, or at least some Catholic-esque horror, this little gem didn’t pop up. And it should have, because it was published. So I’m not sure why the book-gods didn’t bless me with this gift until recently, but I’m glad they did.
The nuns here aren’t Catholic. Maybe ex-Catholic is the most accurate. Because they’re worshipping something in their falling down monastery, but the Christian god ain’t it. Instead, they’ve got themselves a little vineyard that makes magical wine, but that isn’t all that’s going on here.
This is another example of a story not explaining its whole world but managing to get away with it. Maybe if it were a longer novel I’d take issue with it, but for something short like this, it works. In fact, it might be in its favor since I’m still thinking about what exactly is going on this monastery.
I still can’t decide if it’s just magical wine or if there is some kind of timey-wimey thing going on. The backstory here is that the monastery was bombed by the Nazis in WWII, killing half the order. Could that bomb have triggered some kind of time distortion situation? Maybe. The book is meant to read like the wine has incredible curative powers, but that can’t be the only thing at work here.
And I’m not just talking about the cosmic monster that lives beneath the vineyard.
The nuns no longer age. It’s somewhat implied that the nearby village also doesn’t seem to be aging. It also feels like this is a place that time has forgotten about, only ever remembered when the Catholic Church remembers it wants a cut of any profits the nuns might see from their wine.
Am I wrong or am I right? It could go either way, but I like that the possibility is there.
While I was looking around to see what others had to say about this story, I noticed several people felt that it should have been more ‘folk horror-y.’ I think that’s a weird take to have, considering it follows Folk Horror Chain Theory to the letter.
I’ve already discussed how the monastery seems to be in a time outside of time. It’s also physically isolated, with our main protagonist arriving via a car wreck with no method to leave until the townsfolk can repair it to a drivable state. There are very few visitors, too.
There is a bit of preoccupation with the landscape and setting, with a lot of time devoted to the ruinous state the monastery is in. No one ever repaired the monastery after it was bombed, and these sisters of the cloth have been living in its rubble for the last 40 years. Their vineyard also has a lot of time spent in it.
The skewed morals come from their lapsed Catholicism. We get some extra weirdness at the party surrounding The Happening, though I’m not sure these details add much to the story. Menstrual communion isn’t really bringing much to the table for me here, but I guess McMillan felt the need to really drive home how uncatholic these nuns have become.
And then we have The Happening, which does indeed involve the cosmic monster living beneath their vineyard.
What drives it home for me is the following quote from Scovell:
So sure, he’s specifically referencing the folk horror films of the 1970s, but we see that paranoid trauma rearing its head in Sisters of the Crimson Vine. The bombing of their monastery, coupled with almost starving to death after the Catholic Church doesn’t come to help them, is the genesis of their new religion. It’s this betrayal that is at the forefront of their beliefs and worship.
If this had been a longer work, I think there would have been a lot more to explore, but I was satisfied with where the novella ended up. It had a lot to play with and it used all the links in the Folk Horror Chain to its advantage.