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 account of disastrous scientific hubris, equal parts ancestral sf and pre-Victorian horror. This short narrative is...