“The Beast in Me” Is at War with Itself

Aggie Wiggs, a famous Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, is living in a home that is far too big for her in Oyster Bay, a wealthy enclave on Long Island. The home is too big for her because the family she once had is gone. Her envy-inducing Victorian house, wrapped in floral wallpaper and outfitted with plush rugs, still has a warmth to it, but this warmth portends sickness, fever. The pipes rattle. There are ticking sounds. The sink gurgles like an infant, spitting up rusty water.

A woman and her house—it’s the stuff that gives gothic fiction its life spark. And it’s what animates “The Beast in Me,” a thriller starring Claire Danes and Matthew Rhys, on Netflix. The series is twitching, but it’s not really alive. There is, in the end, a deadness to its clichés about writers and their subjects