After getting your copy of Melmoth, be sure to block off a Saturday morning this fall, grab a blanket and a coffee and just read this entire book. Melmoth is a chilling, disturbing and intriguing gothic horror novel that plunges into the depths of the guilt of people who commit terrible acts. Throughout the ages, there are stories of the Holocaust, a woman burned by acid, and the Armenian genocide. Who is guilty and who is not? Is doing nothing worse than doing something? There are many questions in this book that left me reeling and that I will be contemplating for a long time. It resonated with me and has implications for our current times in a way that I was not expecting. Highly recommended for fellow lovers of historical fiction, gothic horror, and books that make you think.
"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 PostFor 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. . . .