Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Carrère, Emmanuel - Faren Miller (review date December 1990)

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Faren Miller (review date December 1990)

SOURCE: A review of Gothic Romance, in Locus, Vol. 26, No. 6, December, 1990, p. 17.

[In the review below, Miller provides a favorable assessment of Gothic Romance.]

Emmanuel Carrère's Gothic Romance belongs to a very different tradition of literary horror: elusive, elliptical, a theater of cruelty where little blood gets spilled, but dreams slice sharper than knives. At worst, this mode can generate pretentious nonsense or out-of-focus navel gazing—and the first chapters of this novel do not seem to promise much more. Then the surprises begin.

The initial encounter with down-and-out druggie Polidori (a historical participant in the tale-spinning session that inspired Mary Shelley's Frankenstein) is woozy with opium and angst. Fortunately, it mutates into a livelier Gothic tale being penned, in our own times, by one Captain Walton. Like Frankenstein, it's an...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Philip H. Solomon (review date May 1987)
   2. John Gross (review date 1 April 1988)
   3. Oliver Conant (review date 17 April 1988)
   4. John Updike (review date 4 July 1988)
   5. Irving Malin (review date Spring 1989)
   6. Publishers Weekly (review date 25 May 1990)
   7. Richard Eder (review date 22 July 1990)
   8. Scott Winnett (review date November 1990)
   9. R. R. K. (review date November-December 1990)
   10. Faren Miller (review date December 1990)
4. Copyright