![]() Maturin was an Irish priest and the great-uncle of Oscar Wilde, who used the surname Melmoth when he lived in exile in France after he was released. ![]() For all its Gothic trappings, this is a book about guilt and the ways in which human beings attempt to outrun it. ![]() There is much that is mendacious and corrupt in our world and there are millions of depictions of such depravity at the click of the 8/10 The perfect literary depiction of evil. The novel takes inspiration from Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) by Charles Maturin. John sees a painting of a distant relative on. An 1820 Gothic NovelMelmoth the WandererAbridgedCharl. Melmoth the Wanderer opens with a student, John Melmoth, leaving college to attend to his uncle’s deathbed in a house on a clifftop by the coast. I am not claiming that Maturin himself is evil just giving a hasty nod that I hope he does not see to an author whose depiction of evil will never be bettered. Read 358 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. The book had a profound effect on me… so much so I banished it from my shelves and turned my face to light, fresh air… all those things that are good, wholesome, perfect, kind, happy… simply to try and banish the stain of this book. Yet his painting is so perfect in its vision of hell, of evil, of depravity, of madness, of sin, of immorality, of corruption that I could not finish the book as my soul shrivelled under the withering power of the author’s sorrow, pain, misery, misfortune. The content of the book, the journey of Melmoth from the opening wind-swept scenes on the Irish coast, through the fantastical paradigm of temptation, castigating and mocking the monastic Inquisition of the zenith of Catholicism… all are drawn, described, depicted, painted in a language that shows Charles Maturin to be a literary genius akin to Victor Hugo. Not horror that is cinematically shocking, not the kind of creeping horror you’d get from a Stephen King novel… rather the disquieting and silencing effect of coming face to face with true evil. A student, John Melmoth, travels to his uncle’s death-bed, and finds his uncle in fear of some mysterious stranger before he dies. It is the first - and only - book in some four decades or more of reading that I have set aside, unfinished, deeply disturbed feeling I had a glimpse of true horror. The reason is that I found this the perfect literary depiction of evil: Evil in an abstruse manner. It has taken this reviewer considerable time since setting aside this unfinished book to write a review.
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