Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Carrère, Emmanuel - Publishers Weekly (review date 25 May 1990)

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Publishers Weekly (review date 25 May 1990)

SOURCE: A review of Gothic Romance, in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 237, No. 21, May 25, 1990, pp. 51-2.

[In the following review, the critic summarizes the plot of Gothic Romance.]

An allusive and contrived retelling of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and the circumstances of its composition—when the Shelleys, Byron, and his mad young medic "poor Polidori" lived abroad and traded ghost stories—this novel [Gothic Romance] shuttles to and fro in time as if an intertextual exercise. It opens with the embittered addict Polidori living in squalor with a prostitute and claiming that Shelley stole his ideas for her story while his own tale, The Vampire, has been slighted. In a suicidal overdose, he imagines himself drenched on the deck of a sinking ship. The scene shifts to contemporary London, where the ship's captain, Robert Walton (the Arctic explorer in...

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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