Perry occupies an unusual place in the literary world. In one particularly effusive review, the Guardian called it a “masterly piece of postmodern gothic,” deserving “all the prizes and praise that will be heaped upon it.” Like Perry’s first two novels, Melmoth succeeds on at least two levels - as a thrilling monster story that will keep you up late into the night and a weighty meditation on the dark side of human nature. Mothers warn their children about her: if you’re bad, they say, she’ll take you away. Condemned to a life of eternal loneliness, she wanders the world like “a black ship adrift in a windless calm,” seeking out “everything that’s most distressing and most wicked, in a world which is surpassingly wicked, and full of distress.” She’s there when an Ottoman bureaucrat draws up a document facilitating the Armenian genocide she’s there when a boy in Nazi-occupied Prague gives up his Jewish neighbors because he covets their beautiful radio. In Perry’s version, Melmoth is a woman, and not a very nice one. Perry is in New York on tour for Melmoth, a feminist reimagining of an 1820 gothic tale about a man who sells his soul to the devil. One woman said she’d keep the book in the freezer overnight.” And people have been really shit up! And now I feel bad.

“I can remember when I was planning it, saying to my husband, I just want to really shit people up with this book. I’d been visited by the mysterious figure that haunts the dark corners of her third novel, Melmoth.

When I meet the gothic British novelist Sarah Perry on a gloomy fall afternoon, she isn’t surprised that I dreamed, the previous night, of a woman robed in black, with eyes like black holes, watching me from the corner of my apartment. always watching, always seeking out everything that’s most distressing and most wicked, in a world which is surpassingly wicked, and full of distress.” As in Maturin’s original, stories nest within stories, and it’s by means of a collection of letters, diary entries, footnotes and endnotes that the whole is pieced together.Photo: Jamie Drew/Courtesy of Sarah Perry In Perry’s version of the story, she turns the titular figure into a woman: Melmoth the Witness, otherwise known as Melmotte or Melmotka, “cursed to wander the earth without home or respite. Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) told the story of a man trapped in peripatetic purgatory after trading his soul for 150 years of extra life. Melmoth, meanwhile, re-writes an early 19 th -century Gothic classic for the modern age. The Essex Serpent, Sarah Perry’s last book – which was a Sunday Times number one bestseller and Waterstones Book of the Year 2016 – reads like a long lost fin-de-siècle Gothic classic.

Melmoth by sarah perry