Death, she realizes, has its imprint on him, “like a watermark on empty sheets of paper.” Fighting panic and paranoia (“Is it her - has she come? Do you see her?”), Karel tells Helen a story about a man called Josef Hoffman who died in the library and left behind a strange manuscript. One snowy day after Christmas she encounters one of those friends, Dr. Small, sad and insignificant, she has few friends and many secrets, remaining tight-lipped about her past and the reasons for “her exile, her self-punishment.” Perry’s protagonist is Helen Franklin, a translator who left England for Prague 20 years earlier. Perry’s version constitutes an ingenious rewrite: She sets events in present-day Prague, swaps macabre acts for uncanny happenings and, most significantly, transforms Maturin’s itinerant bogeyman into a bogeywoman. “Melmoth” sees Perry channeling Charles Robert Maturin’s diabolical masterpiece from 1820, “Melmoth the Wanderer.” That book’s eponymous drifter was a man who exchanged his soul for immortality in a pact with the devil and then hunted out innocents to tempt into damnation. Her eagerly awaited follow-up revolves around another fiendish legend - not the resurfaced “scarebeast” of that previous novel but the return of a tormented villain condemned to ceaselessly roam the Earth. Last year, Sarah Perry captivated readers with “The Essex Serpent,” a marvelous mock-Victorian tale about religious faith, supernatural myth and the mystery of the human heart.
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