The Grotesque

by Patrick McGrath

Overview

This exuberantly spooky novel, in which horror, repressed eroticism, and sulfurous social comedy intertwine like the vines in an overgrown English garden, is now a major motion picture, starring Alan Bates, Sting, and Theresa Russell.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780679776215
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	01/28/1997
Series:	Vintage Contemporaries
Pages:	192
Sales rank:	350,048
Product dimensions:	5.22(w) x 7.97(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Patrick McGrath is the author of several modern gothic novels, including Asylum and Spider, and two collections of stories. He lives in New York, where he is on the writing faculties of the New School and Princeton University.

What People are Saying About This

John Hawkes

Wonderfully inventive, sinister, macabre yet comic...The Grotesque is high art.

Editorial Reviews

Witty, weird and highly enjoyable, this gothic British tale is aptly titled. The set-up is macabre: a distinguished paleontologist is brain-damaged and slowly turning into a vegetable. He cannot speak, but narrates an interior monologue of all he sees and hears: a lot of sexual shenanigans and a particularly grisly murder, all centered around "Fledge,'' the butler, who has ambitions. The stylistic joke is that all these horrors take place in a quaint, genteel English country setting, where the village is "Pock-on-the-Fling,'' the pub, "The Hodge and Purlet'' and the barrister, "Sir Fleckley Tome.'' However deadly the deed, the language is always decorous and impeccably mannered. The result is strangely hilarious -- as if a Stephen King story were being told in the manner of a latter-day Anthony Trollope.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly