The Corruptions of the Gothic: A Review of The Luminous Memories of Alexander Vile
by Tash Jones (available for Amazon Kindle March 25, 2013; www.tashjones.co.uk ) This debut novel from Masters student Tash Jones is a compelling mirror-glance journey into the effects of the Gothic novel on Victorian sensibilities. While both referencing outright and adapting subtle elements of Walpole’s Castle of Otranto , Stoker’s Dracula , Shelley’s Frankenstein , Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde , and Austen’s Northanger Abbey , The Luminous Memories of Alexander Vile concerns itself with pulling back the layers of appearance and looking at the arts and their relationship to the dark side of Victorian-era values (the novel’s events take place in 1892–93). Uses the standard Gothic conventions of diaries, letters, and narration, Vile is a mystery that is slowly pieced together, reading at times like the surrealism of Poe, with generous doses of the flowery, image-laden and complexly sytaxed prose of the time in which it takes place. It is a story of people...