I thought it would end with something like: they were all so paranoid that they weren’t thinking rationally and were just imagining everything.

At first, I didn’t really take the story seriously. Helen, as the main character remains the most mysterious because there’s a great sense of suspense leading up to her admission of her greatest sin. Helen and her friends are a strange group of intellectuals who each have their own faults and problems. We know she lives minimally, that she left England and never went back, but we don’t know why until over 100 pages in. Throughout the first half of the novel, the reader is left guessing about why Helen Franklin feels the need to punish herself. To Helen it all seems the stuff of unenlightened fantasy.īut, unaware, as she wanders the cobblestone streets Helen is being watched. As such superstition has it, Melmoth travels through the ages, dooming those she persuades to join her to a damnation of timeless, itinerant solitude. 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.

In Prague, working as a translator, she has found a home of sorts-or, at least, refuge. It has been years since Helen Franklin left England. This was the perfect spooky read for October, and I am so glad I had the opportunity to pick this book up!įor 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. I had never heard of Melmoth the Wanderer before, and I think the way Perry wrote this ominous story really brought a sense of fear and paranoia to me as a reader as well as to the characters within the novel. It was a super strange concept, but also very interesting.

I was immediately drawn to the cover the day we got it in and I thought ‘I have to read this!’ I didn’t really know it would be a Gothic story completely focused on this figure coming to take sinners to die with her. I got a free paperback copy of this book from work, at B&N, courtesy of Harper Collins.

Sarah perry melmoth review