"The Kept," by James Scott Winter and discontent. The future Richard III pairs those elements in the first line of Shakespeare's play, and they are also paired, with piercing chill, in James Scott's debut novel, "The Kept." It is 1897. Elspeth Howell is making her way to an isolated cabin in upstate New York. Elspeth is pursued by cruel weather and her past as "a sinner," a woman besieged by "anger, covetousness, thievery." Unlike "false and treacherous" Richard, she believes she has conquered her worst impulses. She bears gifts for her five children and her husband, Jorah. She longs for the comforts of home. What she discovers, instead, is the worst kind of retribution - a slaughter of innocents triggered by her own compulsive history. Before long, grievously wounded Elspeth and her surviving son, Caleb, leave the ruins of their homestead. They have no motive other than crude resolution. Even the bond between them is thin and unreliable. Elspeth is not, and has never been, any kind of mother. Caleb, raised far from the rituals of civilization, does not know how to be either citizen or son. He sees himself as a hunter. He vows to track the men who have murdered his family. What drives Elspeth is more complex. Her journey toward reckoning is fueled by a belief in the moral accounting of the universe. She will have to pay for her sins. That payment might be more satisfying if she is an active participant in her fate. James Scott Taylor Scott Scott is a master of mood. "The closer she got to home," he writes early on, about Elspeth's return, "the deeper the snow became, and the more furiously it fell. It was as if, she thought, God wanted to keep outsiders away as much as the Howells did. This landscape is more mythic than historic, and Scott's characters are dark brush strokes of appetite and deceit. His central concern, as a storyteller, is the dynamic of consequence. People, in this novel, are the sum of their emotional failures. As Elspeth and Caleb careen toward Watersbridge, a wastrel town on the shores of Lake Erie, they encounter a series of ominous signposts - some human, some not - all aimed toward unmitigated foreboding. Both principals are haunted by dreams. Both grieve, usually silently, about how they have failed each other. Even those who offer succor to the road-weary pair are tight in the grip of their own ghosts. The cold is relentless. So are the interior burdens borne by Scott's characters. The full weight of Elspeth's craven past descends in the long central section of the book. Watersbridge was the scene of one of her crimes, and though she disguises herself to delay recognition, it is not long before she realizes the town (a kind of Deadwood on the lake) is likely to steal more from her than she has ever stolen from it. Caleb remains focused on avenging his siblings. Elspeth, who takes a dangerous job at an ice company, begins to discern the only true penance she can serve is accepting the role that has tormented her for so long: that of mother. When an acquaintance asks, sternly, "Have you given any thought to what you're doing to that boy?" Elspeth's reply is contrite and redemptive in equal measures. "Not enough," she says. But more lately. "The Kept" is gothic in both structure and atmosphere. Violence comes swiftly, with no warning. The strong are without sentiment. The weak retain nothing but shards of their remembered affections. No family is whole. No love can be complete. In a pivotal encounter, a minister reminds the guilt-laden Elspeth that "Eden only lasted so long." There is no glimmer of Eden on the shores of Lake Erie. The novel reaches its haunting conclusion at a second far-flung homestead, this one also a harbor for the distorted loyalties of family. Elspeth, who has finally earned a bloody brand of maternal confidence, prepares Caleb for battle in a way that gives her, poignantly, "an excuse to touch him once more." Both of them make gritty final choices that satisfy Scott's brooding sense of tragedy. Little else survives. Mothers and sons. As Richard III might note, such pairs are forever enough to "fright the souls of fearful adversaries." By James Scott Harper. $25.99.