I’m particularly interested in fear, and storytelling that is designed to provoke fear and anxiety, and how we all put our own anxieties and fears onto myths and legends.
It’s an ancient human desire to tell stories to each other and try to understand the world through storytelling. It binds communities together in quite strange ways, so with The Essex Serpent in particular, fear of a myth or legend was something binding them together but driving them apart as well. I’m very interested in the way shared storytelling, shared myth, and shared fear do a number of things. What, as a writer, do you feel is offered, in terms of perspective, by narratives built around exploring that blurred line? It makes the lines between the two so blurred. In both Melmoth and The Essex Serpent, you blend folklore and reality in the narrative in such an interesting way. Perry spoke to Longreads about writing a female monster, the place of myth and fear in storytelling, and active morality from her home in the UK. Weaving together disturbing true, yet barely remembered, historical atrocities with a gripping story of personal terror, Melmoth poses questions about who bears responsibility in mankind’s darkest moments, and how individuals grapple with guilt.
But when Karel disappears and Helen begins reading the testimonies left behind by those who had been made to walk the Earth with Melmoth, witnessing alongside her the atrocities carried out by mankind, Helen wonders if she could be Melmoth’s next victim. When Karel suddenly begins talking about a mysterious woman monster called Melmoth the Witness, Helen and Thea dismiss her as a myth. But even in this self-created loneliness, Helen meets and makes friends with a couple named Karel and Thea. She carries a significant sense of guilt for an unspecified wrongdoing in her youth, for which she tries to atone by isolating herself and living austerely. Helen Franklin has been living in Prague for years, in a kind of self-imposed exile from her native England. In Melmoth, the nature of complicity and the manifestation of guilt are a central focus, spinning Perry’s eerie storytelling into important lessons and questions for our modern world. But her latest book, Melmoth, feels like more than just a novel it feels like a call to action. Her atmospheric 2014 debut After Me Comes the Flood revealed Perry to be a unique writer of disquieting tales laced through with an aura of mystery, a reputation solidified by the 2016 publication of The Essex Serpent, a work of historical fiction. Sarah Perry’s novels have been praised for their distinctive voice and haunting subjects. Bridey Heing | Longreads | October 2018 | 8 minutes (2,039 words)
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