Dark Shadows: Heiress of Collinwood (spoilers upon release)

The first couple of chapters are a little confusing at times, and seem like they were part of a different draft than the rest of the book. Chapter 3 Seems very much like it should be the opening of the book, and you could happily ignore the first two chapters and not miss a damn thing. A lot of stuff from the first two chapters is repeated elsewhere in the work, or retold a little differently. The first two chapters also get a lot of little details about the show wrong, whereas the rest of the book is fine and in line with the show (and even some of the audios) to the point where it actually contradicts some things from chapters 1 & 2. It's... odd. I'm going to go with the rest of the book as far as figuring out timelines and such, but still...

The present day stuff is set in 1972, at least six months after the events of Wolf Moon Rising, which were set around November/December in 1971, the prior year. Timeline of books is so far:

April, 1971 - Angelique's Descent
Oct/Nov, 1971 - The Salem Branch
Nov/Dec, 1971 - Wolf Moon Rising
June/July(?), 1972 - Heiress of Collinwood

As we begin Chapter 3, Vicki's on a train to Collinsport. Amid a recap of stuff that only happened a page or so back in chapter 2 (I swear, different drafts), we start to get a more concrete version of the timeline of events that was mismanaged in the opening chapters. It is, as far as I can tell, as follows:

Most of the 1797 stuff in Chapter 1 happens, but instead of poisoning herself, she threw herself from Widow's Hill, as per the show. She woke up in Collinsport in 1970/71, and left without telling anyone she was back, just wanting to get away from everything. She went to Bangor and eventually got a job in the mail room of the local broadcast studio. Some six months before our story begins, she was offered a position as a reporter, and wound up with the "Death in the Afternoon" segment. She keeps worrying that she's not really here, and that she's dead, and frequently has nightmares and hallucinations about 1797, which we can hand-wavingly ascribe the first chapters as her having one in the middle of her broadcast and just sort of working through it, which is why some of the details are different from what really happened.

She gets out a copy of Jane Eyre and start reminiscing about her childhood at the foundling home, comparing it to the novel. We find out that up until Vicki was nine or so, the foundling home was run by none other than Charity Trask! Ms Trask was old and cold, a bitch of a woman, crippled by an accident (I guess she survived throwing herself off the hill, but not enough to walk properly afterwards), who badly mistreated the children. Mrs Hopewell was her replacement, brought in after Ms Trask was fired when Vicki was discovered and treated after trying to run away one particularly horrid day. The foundling home was also, by the by, one of the (apparently many) institutions that Gregory Trask set up as he roamed the nation.

I find it amusing that Vicki's various episode-opening monologues were apparently her dictating to her diary. She's a little embarrassed at how she sounded as she reads back the episode 1 intro heheh.

While a healthy amount of the book takes place in the Collinwood estate, a sizable portion of it takes place down in town proper. It's nice to see some of the faces from the early early episodes. Mr Wells is still running the front desk at the inn, and Harry Jones still runs the taxi service. I hope we get more down into the town in this one. The last three books largely focused on the Collinwood estate in the "present day" segments, so it's nice to change that up a bit.

So, leaving the actual events of the book aside, there are several times throughout the book where Vicki peruses Liz's diary during her search for hints as to why Liz might have left her the house. She also visits the foundling home and looks up her file for information. We find thus:

The bit of Wolf Moon Rising where Paul Stodard shoots Quentin happened in 1946 (it wasn't specifically mentioned in that book). Paul must have done something extra, because this actually put Quentin in the hospital and on the verge of death (but couldn't quite finish him off, as he was basically on the verge of death for a little over nine months). Liz tracks down Magda Rakosi and begs her to help. Magda agrees... if Liz will give her the child she's carrying. This was a bit of a shock to Liz, who didn't even know she was pregnant. Liz refuses, but comes to realize that there's no way Quentin can be around to play dad if he's dead, and alternatively that there's little way in hell that Paul is going to be happy about this child. Liz flies to Paris for an "extended vacation" to round out the pregnancy and give birth, and tearfully hands her off to Magda (who's a little disappointed it's a girl, but is optimistic that she can turn her into someone all the men ruin themselves after heheh).

For reasons unknown, Vicki was left at the foundling home in the basket, but Magda came to pick her up after a bit, and temporarily housed her there on and off until she was five or so. Vicki has basically no memories of wandering around with the gypsies for the first half decade of her life.

So, she's Liz & Quentin's daughter (which has worrying implications if she ever settles down and has a son). Quentin's never actually named in Liz's diary, so Vicki doesn't know her dad's Quentin (not has she ever formally met Quentin, for that matter). She and Liz have a talk about it at the end of the book, but it's left open as to whether or not they actually told anyone else about it, or whether any of the other members of the family (excepting Barnabas, who knew Vicki's parentage the whole damn time and just never said anything) were even informed that Vicki was briefly in town.

Minor random notes:

Jackie is just wholesale going by "Miranda" now, and I like to think it's because Angelique is back, so we now have Angelique and Miranda as separate entities (at least until something happens to Jackie, I assume).

Barnabas apparently found out about the Vicki/Liz thing at some point, and assumed Vicki had been told.

It is heavily implied that Barnabas and Victoria had sex when she spent the night at the old house in 285/286/287.

There was apparently a whole novel's worth of adventure between the end of Wolf Moon Rising and this, with Barnabas going off and meeting with other vampires in Europe to learn how to survive without blood, Mrs Johnson's identical twin sister coming in to fill in for her and promptly getting killed off in a grisly way, Miranda and David getting betrothed, and a mad scientist somehow trapping the whole family and hooking them up to a life extracting machine (okay he had Angelique's help, but still).

With some handwaving and squinting, this aligns with The Ghost Watcher (Maggie's out of Windcliff, and back working the inn), Return to Collinwood (no one else knows about Vicki's parentage, or that she's even back), The Fall of the House of Trask (Charity became crippled and bitter after an un-talked-about incident, presumably dancing herself off the cliff), and the Tony & Cassandra stories (Angelique is alive again by the end of the book)