![]() ![]() Instead, he offers several apparently unconnected stories that concentrate on families in desperate straits and individuals in extreme crises, pushing the limits of man's inhumanity to man. Shelley's "Frankenstein." Unlike "The Monk," however, Maturin's novel does not rely heavily on Lewis' supernatural machinery (ghosts, demons, bleeding nuns, etc.). Rather than the seemingly landscape-obsessed, rationalistic Radcliffe, Maturin takes his direct gothic influences from the claustrophobic psychological terrors of Godwin's "Caleb Williams," Lewis' "The Monk," and M.W. Maturin and his characters are quick to point out that this is not 'Radcliffe-romance' gothic, in the direct style of works like "The Mysteries of Udolpho". One hundred years after Jonathan Swift, Maturin takes up his Irish predecessor's gift for harsh, even malevolent satire against any and all offenders - organized religion, government, lovers, warriors - even making broad, devastating comments on humanity in general. Maturin's "Melmoth the Wanderer" is a brilliantly constructed work of gothic fiction. Scattered throughout the text are poppies of arcane lore-the very kind of volume that Poe would have had in his hands when the Raven came tapping at his chamber door! Not only did Poe love this book, but so did Doestoyevsky, Balzac, Lautreamont, Oscar Wilde, Scott, and hoards of other literary greats! Hey-add your name to the list! We often wish we could rip out 50 or so pages of purple prose here and there and throw them into the mouths of the nearest BLACK DOGS from Hades, but we must restrain ourselves enough to follow Melmoth (the chuckling friend-or should we say fiend?-of John Dee and Edward Kelly it turns out)-to his ultimate damnation. The story is a vertiginously creaky assemblage of vignettes that spiral in and out of each other in a bewildering-and sometimes belabored-manner. Written by a man who assumed his brother's debts and apparently went out of his mind trying to write himself out from under this monetary burden a man who wore a wafer pasted to the center of his forehead while writing, and who fancied the ballroom and dancing just as much (or maybe more) than the pulpet -Melmoth the Wanderer is simply the oddest and most delicious concoction of mad prose this side of Abiezzar Cope. ![]()
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