Reading Sarah Perry's extraordinary debut novel, it is hard not to reach for comparisons, if only in a bemused attempt to work out just why this book is so very good. On the surface, it seems straightforward ... I could not put this book down ... what Perry does here is to render the suspense metaphysical, one might even say environmental: we care about her characters, as we care about the characters in a novel by Thomas Hardy, say, but it is also the case that her dramatis personae, like Hardy's, are transcended by the drama that unfolds in the land, in the air and, most of all, in the water that surrounds them ... By the close...the careful reader emerges with a sense of having encountered a unique new writing talent, already working at a level of subtlety and restraint that many more seasoned novelists lack ... What makes this novel truly remarkable is its unique vision, its skilful and sophisticated characterisations, and the creation, without unseemly effects, of an atmosphere that will haunt readers long after the final page.
... this impressive debut casts a spell that is at once sinister and seductive ... things become decidedly odd ... Perry infuses her narrative with disquiet and mystery ... One moment the inhabitants of the house feel like fully formed, flesh-and-blood creations ... The next moment they seem ethereal and unknowable forces of nature. In a similar vein, the house is both a concrete, finite space and a hazy, otherworldly realm suspended out of time ... We search for our own meaning while succumbing to her elegant prose and dark magic.
...strange: ominously swollen with elusive significance. The action is unnervingly out-of-time: we might be in the future – the earth-scorching, bird-killing heat brought on by global warming – or in the past – no one has mobile phones or computers ... After Me is steeped in a quasi-religious atmosphere of impending doom. Perry was brought up in a religious home, deprived of pop culture in favour of 'classic literature, Victorian hymns, and the King James Bible'. Her work perhaps reflects such a diet: not only literate, it also harnesses the mythic power of religious and historical texts to lend weight and wonderment ... Perry is adept at peeling back the skin to reveal a detailed anatomy of psychological motivation ... Perry suggests that, in the end, there isn’t much that’s stranger than human love and envy, fear and desire. A gripping, memorable, impressive debut.
The last words of the novel are 'trying to make it out,' and Ms. Perry says she’s pleased when people come away with totally different ideas about what she intended. Is the novel an allegory of climate change? Or maybe one of those stories, like William Golding’s 'Pincher Martin,' where the central character dies at the start and is undergoing a kind of penance or purgatory? ... Horror is introspective. Sprites, gnomes, dragons—we can cope with them. Fears in the head aren’t so easy. After Me Comes the Flood is a notable experiment in inner Gothic: atmospheric, haunting, disturbing.
... what Sarah Perry has given us is an elaborately constructed, atmospheric work that builds slowly to a haunting conclusion and is worth reading. This is very much a character-driven work on a couple of different levels ... there is a dreamlike element that affects the characters as well as the reader. That said, what occurs here—a stranger stumbles into a situation and becomes an extended part of it—is something that many of us have experienced, with events influenced one way or another as a result. This makes Perry’s story even more unsettling. Again, After Me Comes the Flood may not be what I expected, but that shouldn’t stop you from reading and enjoying this carefully crafted work.
What compels the reader most in this tale of obsession, guilt, and love, with a religious underpinning, is the dreamlike atmosphere that Perry conjures in the most elegant of prose ... A treat for Perry fans and all readers who appreciate ambiguity.
...eerie ... [an] unsettling debut, which shuttles between fairy story and allegory without ever resolving into a single shape or genre ... Like Shirley Jackson, Carmen Maria Machado, and other evocative masters of the gothic, Perry circles closer to answers without ever dispelling the magic that holds her narrative in breathless suspense.
A mysterious fable about honesty and deceit, love and self-loathing, and our sometimes-doomed quests for inner peace.
...Perry’s eerie, peculiar latest ...Though the slow pace will test readers’ patience, the novel succeeds in building a strange world in the English woods. Perry’s fans will want to take a look.
