"Lucy Harbin Took An Ax, TOOK An Ax, TOOK AN AX!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

                                                     "Lizzie Borden took an ax,
                                                       And gave her mother forty whacks.
                                                       When she saw what she had done,
                                                       She gave her father forty one."
                                                       ---Famous folk rhyme


                                     Lucy Harbin, as all my girls know, is the gay iconic re-imagining of Lizzie, by Robert Bloch, as embodied by Joan Crawford at her campiest, in the William Castle film "Strait-Jacket," back in 1964. We just LOVE that crazy bitch, Lucy, darlings, but let us not forget that, without Lizzie, there would not have been Lucy.

                                      I am sure Sarah Schmidt knew what she was getting into, when she began writing this, her first, novel.  This will surely not be the last time Lizzie's story is explored, but I was fascinated by the spin Schmidt put on it.

                                       For starters, she stays very close to the time frame of the murders, and their aftermath.  She goes as far in the future to 1905, and as far back as to Lizzie, clearly the favored daughter, if a bit spoiled, getting the Grand Tour of Europe as a young woman.

                                         The dynamics of the household is everyone resenting everyone else.  The Borden sisters resent each other, their father, the stepmother resents them, the maid, Bridget, resents being employed by them....clearly this is a powder keg waiting to go off.

                                           I will not ruin things except to say the big surprise, is the supposition, that, whether Lizzie was guilty or not, the Bordens were marked for murder, anyway.  You will have to read the book to see what I mean, and glean the meaning of the book's cover, but it puts a spin on things I had never considered before.

                                            The book is almost a bit "King Lear-ish" in the inevitability of tragedy lurking about the Borden house.  The Bordens would have been murdered, no matter what, and that is a fascinating premise.

                                             No matter what you may or not believe, no matter what the "Lizzie Borden Hoedown" song says, mother can, indeed, be chopped up in Massachusetts!!!!!!!!!!!!!