After Me Comes the Flood

January 15, 2020
In this eerie debut novel from Perry (Melmoth, 2018, etc.), now published in the U.S. for the first time, a man becomes lost in the woods only to be welcomed by a household of strange but passionate residents. Tired of the summer heat, John Cole sets off from his London bookshop to visit his brother, who lives by the sea. But John never arrives. In the dark Thetford forest, his car breaks down, and he loses his way in the woods. At the end of a path, he reaches the door of a grand mansion. The young girl who opens it seems to recognize him. "John Cole! Is that you? It is you, isn't it--it must be, I'm so glad. I've been waiting for you all day!" So begins Perry's unsettling debut, which shuttles between fairy story and allegory without ever resolving into a single shape or genre. The house is both magnificent and menacing, with "broken chandeliers trailing chipped strings of glass drops," a glass eye constantly changing hands, and empty meat hooks dangling in the kitchen. Consumed with dread and guilt about being an imposter, John chronicles his days with the residents in a journal that reads like a fever dream. There's Hester, a fiercely protective matron and former actress; Elijah, a former preacher who has lost his faith and fears going outside; Walker, a chain-smoking, card-playing devil in a rumpled tuxedo; Eve, a coquettish pianist who longs for attention; and the siblings Clare and Alex, otherworldly changelings who seem at once capable of complete innocence and total guile. Unlike Perry's following two novels, plot matters less than mood here--confusion, uncertainty, and endless possibility unfold over the week of John's stay. Even the sundial in the garden tells "two times at once." What connects this fragile household together? Who is sending Alex cruel poison-pen letters? Why does Eve make John feel "pain set up very low in his stomach...as if hooks had been pushed through his flesh"? And whose place has John actually taken? Like Shirley Jackson, Carmen Maria Machado, and other evocative masters of the gothic, Perry circles closer to answers without ever dispelling the magic that holds her narrative in breathless suspense. A mysterious fable about honesty and deceit, love and self-loathing, and our sometimes-doomed quests for inner peace.

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January 27, 2020
In Melmoth author Perry’s eerie, peculiar latest (first published in the U.K. in 2014), an anxious London bookshop owner assumes a new identity among a set of mentally disturbed strangers. After feeling oppressed by the summer heat, John Cole closes up the shop and decides to visit his brother in Norfolk. On the way, John gets lost and suffers a panic attack, his car breaks down, and then, following a path through the forest, he discovers a house full of people who claim they have been awaiting his arrival. Initially unable to admit he’s not the “Jon Coules” they’d been expecting, he finds himself captivated by the group of old friends— particularly Eve and Alex, both in their 20s—who know each other from their past stays at St. Jude’s psychiatric ward. Hester, the mischievous, much older ringleader, vows to help the others improve themselves, while Alex, alarmed by anonymous letters he’s received about a nearby dam, takes dangerous nightly swims to check for signs of impending floods. Over the week spent at the house, John’s lust for Eve grows and he settles into his borrowed identity as Coules, and Perry teases out questions of sanity, love, and faith. Though the slow pace will test readers’ patience, the novel succeeds in building a strange world in the English woods. Perry’s fans will want to take a look. Agent: Susan Golomb, Writers House.

Starred review from March 1, 2020
On a hot summer day, John Cole closes his London bookshop and travels to his brother's home on the Norfolk coast. Forgetting a map, he loses his way and comes upon a rundown house whose five residents somehow are expecting him. Appreciative of his welcome, he fails to inform his hosts that this must be a case of mistaken identity. In chapters toggling from Cole's first-person voice to third-person accounts, the backgrounds and connections between the residents, who met at a nearby mental hospital, are revealed. One of them, a former patient at the hospital, has deepening concerns about a growing crack in the nearby reservoir that he fears will soon break open and flood their domicile. What compels the reader most in this tale of obsession, guilt, and love, with a religious underpinning, is the dreamlike atmosphere that Perry conjures in the most elegant of prose. This is the first U.S. release of Perry's debut novel, originally published in the UK in 2014, before her lauded The Essex Serpent (2017) and Melmoth (2018); she has described the three books as a gothic trilogy, with this one the most focused on psychological suspense. A treat for Perry fans and all readers who appreciate ambiguity.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)