Angela Meyer's debut novel A Superior Spectre is billed as "the historical richness of Outlander meets the dystopian feminism of Margaret Atwood".
A Superior Spectre Synopsis:
Jeff is dying. Haunted by memories and grappling with the shame of his desires, he runs away to remote Scotland with a piece of experimental tech that allows him to enter the mind of someone in the past. Instructed to only use it three times, Jeff – self-indulgent, isolated and deteriorating – ignores this advice.
In the late 1860s, Leonora lives a contented life in the Scottish Highlands, surrounded by nature, her hands and mind kept busy. Contemplating her future and the social conventions that bind her, a secret romantic friendship with the local laird is interrupted when her father sends her to stay with her aunt in Edinburgh – an intimidating, sooty city; the place where her mother perished.
But Leonora’s ability to embrace her new life is shadowed by a dark presence that begins to lurk behind her eyes, and strange visions that bear no resemblance to anything she has ever seen or known…
A Superior Spectre is a highly accomplished debut novel about our capacity for curiosity, and our dangerous entitlement to it, and reminds us the scariest ghosts aren’t those that go bump in the night, but those that are born and create a place for themselves in the human soul.
(Ventura Press, Simon & Schuster AU 2018)
BOOK REVIEW
This cleverly titled novel is an intriguing mix of gothic psychological thriller and dystopian science fiction.
In A Superior Spectre Meyer explores the inner workings of the mind, the home of desires and passions deemed unseemly either by society, their hosts, or both; offering up through creative extrapolation, the personal insight that may be gained by experiencing the world in another's shoes.
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The post A Superior Spectre by Angela Meyer, Review: Gothic Dystopian Thriller appeared first on Booklover Book Reviews.
