The number of these stories may be because it boasts the longest coastline in England (350 miles), indented with hundreds of water inlets and. Like Lauren Groff’s The Monsters of Templeton (2008), the appearance of a sea monster sheds more light on humanity than on natural history, while the sudden revelation of a creature of the deep heralds change and revelation, as in Jim Lynch’s The Highest Tide (2005). Essex has had a long history of water-serpent myths. The Wall Street Journal The Essex Serpent is a very fine and intelligent novel not only that, but a richly enjoyable one. Book-discussion groups will have a field day with the imagery, the well-developed characters, and the concepts of innocence, evil, and guilt. The vivid, often frightening imagery (the Leviathan, a shack sinking in the bog, the scrape of scales moving up the shingle) and the lush descriptions (“stained glass angels had the wings of jays”) create a magical background for the sensual love story between Sarah and Will. A medieval “winged serpent” myth still holds the inhabitants of Aldwinter in thrall, despite the best efforts of the local rector, Will Ransome and as Perry’s second novel (following After Me Comes the Flood, 2015) wends its way through mysterious disappearances, fog-laden visions, suspicion, and tragedy, it seems as if the monster is real. Secret love and the suggestion of something unearthly moving in the Essex Blackwater drive the intricate plot of this atmospheric historical novel about Cora Seaborne, a widow visiting Colchester with her companion, ostensibly to explore the estuary for fossils.
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