“ Look! It is winter in Prague: Night is rising in the mother of cities and over her thousand spires. If Perry wants to say one thing it is: Look! They are tortured and bereft, these suffering people, but seeing them matters. And, like a Brontë sister in a box at the opera, Perry observes the drama from an omniscient perch, examining her characters as if through a lorgnette. Melmoth sees all, and wants nothing more than to take the guilty in hand, so that they might wander at her side.īearing witness, watching, remembering - it is incredible how terrifying the simple act of seeing a crime can be. In her long black robes, she appears and disappears throughout history, offering solace at moments of agony: to the heretic about to burn on a pyre of greenwood, to the boy who betrayed a Jewish family to the Nazis, to a woman during a mercy killing in Manila. Melmoth walks the earth, a lonely and cursed woman, bearing witness to human suffering. Perry’s “Melmoth” is different in many respects, but achieves a similar effect: It is a scary novel that chills to the bone even as it points the way to a warmer, more humane, place. The original Melmoth was a man who sold his soul for 150 years of additional life, and Maturin’s novel is often seen as 19th-century social and political commentary on the hardships the Irish experienced under English rule. Perry has taken the Irish writer Charles Robert Maturin’s 1820 horror novel “Melmoth the Wanderer” as a jumping-off point. Perry’s new novel, MELMOTH (Custom House, $27.99), is another Gothic stunner, this time set in contemporary Prague. It was a moody and mysterious book, one that felt like a cross between Wilkie Collins and the sensation novelist Mary Elizabeth Braddon, with a little cryptozoology - the study of undocumented life-forms such as Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster - thrown in. “The Essex Serpent,” published last year, revolved around the existence of a monstrous water snake off the coast of East Anglia. There is much to fear and lots of the unknown in Sarah Perry’s superb literary Gothic novels. And this, of course, is the stuff of great fiction. Fear forces us to choose between safety and risk. Fear drives us to do things we might never have considered doing, or to become someone we didn’t plan to be. The gasp as your plane hits turbulence and drops the creeping sensation as the front door squeaks open in the middle of the night the shudder when you hear the dentist’s drill buzz - we all know fear in some form or another.
Lovecraft, a founding father of American horror, who died in 1937, but this sentiment is very much relevant today. The strongest emotion we feel is fear, and the strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.
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