Page des Libraires: Russian Gothic or the new Horla

A story of a mad, sick love, where jealousy gnaws at a man’s sanity like an infernal beast and feeds him with its darkness.

by Karine Henry

Wherever he looks, she is there, Vera, a dazzling woman. Nikolai is astonished that he could be her husband, the one she says she loves: a passionate, yet tragic, pathological love. Because of his astonishment he suddenly comes to have mortal doubts. The reader sees this love from inside Nikolai’s mind and cannot escape. From the first lines he is seized by the jealousy which consumes his soul and gradually drives him mad. A dangerous madness because its fury and violence are as strong as his unreasonable and unreasoning love, a tyrannical and paranoid love. Who is Nikolai jealous of? What harm does the sweet and modest Vera do to him? Nothing? Or everything that Nikolai says he sees and hears? All the tension of the novel revolves around it being impossible to resolve: the reader is condemned to see the world as Nikolai perceives it. And the author pushes ambiguity further as some imaginary scenes seem so real and independent of Nikolai’s will that maybe his hallucinations will fulfil themselves. Of Russian origin, Aleksandr Skorobogatov has written what could become a modern Horla.

Alexandre Skorobogatov
Russian Gothic
Traduit du russe par Dany Savelli
AUTREMENT 120 p., 14 €