Melmoth : A Novel
Author(s): Sarah Perry
“Masterful…scary and smart, working as a horror story but also a philosophical inquiry into the nature of will and love. Perry did as much in her richly praised novel The Essex Serpent, but this is a deeper, more complex novel and more rewarding.” —Washington Post
For centuries, the mysterious dark-robed figure has roamed the globe, searching for those whose complicity and cowardice have fed into the rapids of history’s darkest waters—and now, in Sarah Perry’s breathtaking follow-up to The Essex Serpent, it is heading in our direction.
It has been years since Helen Franklin left England. In Prague, working as a translator, she has found a home of sorts—or, at least, refuge. That changes when her friend Karel discovers a mysterious letter in the library, a strange confession and a curious warning that speaks of Melmoth the Witness, a dark legend found in obscure fairy tales and antique village lore. As such superstition has it, Melmoth travels through the ages, dooming those she persuades to join her to a damnation of timeless, itinerant solitude. To Helen it all seems the stuff of unenlightened fantasy.
But, unaware, as she wanders the cobblestone streets Helen is being watched. And then Karel disappears. . . .
Review(s):
“Masterful…scary and smart, working as a horror story but also a philosophical inquiry into the nature of will and love. Perry did as much in her richly praised novel The Essex Serpent, but this is a deeper, more complex novel and more rewarding.”
“Another Gothic stunner…a scary novel that chills to the bone even as it points the way to a warmer, more humane, place.”
“Ms. Perry, whose last book, The Essex Serpent, was a breakout hit, again proves herself a master of atmosphere.”
“The past few years have brought a glut of fashionably affectless and amoral fiction, to which Sarah Perry’s fierce, full-hearted books about love and ethics feel like the perfect antidote.”
“A gothic masterwork.”
“The last few years have brought a glut of fashionably affectless and amoral fiction....Sarah Perry’s fierce, full-hearted books about love and ethics feel like an antidote to that elegant apathy....In a world that feels desperate, chaotic, and unredeemable, Melmoth asks us to be witnesses for each other.”
“Reels you in, using the same trick of all the best ghost stories, from The Turn of the Screw on: Is there really a ghost before you? Or do you see the projection of your own secret sins and desires? What is more frightening than the human?”
“A novel that manages that vanishingly rare feat – being at once hugely readable and profoundly important…Perry’s masterly piece of postmodern gothic is one of the great literary achievements of our young century.”
“The author of The Essex Serpent casts another haunting spell in this exquisitely written gothic novel.”
“Filled with thought-provoking ideas on historical guilt and personal responsibility, as well as a depth of learning…the message at its heart is an uplifting one; even if redemption for wrongdoing cannot always be achieved, there is power in bearing witness.”
ISBN: 9780062856401