![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() 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. Photo: Jamie Drew/Courtesy of Sarah Perry ![]()
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