Frankenstein bites, and it gnaws politely. It sinks its teeth into your conscience while pretending to nibble at your imagination — a genteel vampire in paper form. It’s a novel born of storms, both meteorological and moral: thunder crashing over Lake Geneva and lightning striking through the skull of Western hubris. Mary Shelley, barely out … Continue reading Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus
Tag: classics
The Devils of Loudun: Possession in the Age of Reasonable Madness
There are two kinds of devilry in this world: the kind that froths and foams in the convent, and the kind that wears a signet ring and drafts policy. Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun is about both — a tale where hysteria kneels before power and calls it holy. I’ve long thought that if Lucifer … Continue reading The Devils of Loudun: Possession in the Age of Reasonable Madness
The Woman in the Wall: Madness, Marriage, and the Myth of Care
‘I’ve got out at last,’ said the woman behind the wallpaper. ‘And you can’t put me back.’ It begins, as all good horrors do, with a husband who means well. John is a physician, a man of reason and gentle authority, and therefore utterly unfit to understand his wife’s soul. He prescribes what men have … Continue reading The Woman in the Wall: Madness, Marriage, and the Myth of Care
The Forest That Feels: On Doré’s Inferno and the Suicide of the Soul
Gustave Doré, Inferno, Canto XIII: The Forest of Suicides, 1866.Wood engraving for Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy (public domain image). When I first looked at Doré’s Forest of Suicides, I thought of winter trees after a storm - those half-living skeletons that creak when the wind passes through, as if remembering they were once alive. … Continue reading The Forest That Feels: On Doré’s Inferno and the Suicide of the Soul
The Mayor of Casterbridge
Some novels are so steeped in fatalism that one half expects the pages to sigh when turned. The Mayor of Casterbridge is such a book - a work that feels as though it were written not with pen and ink, but with plough and sorrow. It’s a tragedy of the English soil, where destiny is … Continue reading The Mayor of Casterbridge
Wording 