Last year, I read and very much enjoyed Sarah Perry's The Essex Serpent, which I found in one of my favorite bookshops. TES is soft and spectral and a bit wistful, even if there is a theoretical monster at its center. In both novels, Perry's writing is both beautiful and a bit precious, evocative and overly self-conscious. This seems a piece with the gothic genre, not known for restraint.
Perry's new novel, Melmoth, is far less gentle, almost a horror tale in that it seeks to build a growing sense of dread such that the reader is looking over their shoulder as they walk down the street. It is based on a gothic ghost story of sorts from 1820, A kind of paranoia takes hold of one character after another as they become convinced (as in The Essex Serpent) that an old fairy tale is true, that Melmoth is watching every transgression, that she is there (something like the satanic narrator of Sympathy for the Devil) to watch the personal and political violences of the world, that she sees the individual failings and the epic, national failings (and Perry suggests that the latter are little more than the accumulation of the former). We roam widely, from Prague to England to Armenia to Manilla, and while the settings change, there are two constants: human failings, and Melmoth's presence, observing every one.
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