Synopses & Reviews
In two novels and one short story collection, Patrick McGrath has established himself as the foremost master of the "new gothic." He has been compared by
The New York Times to Poe, Wilde, Kafka, and Robert Louis Stevenson and hailed as "an ingenious manipulator of discomfort and suspense."
In Dr. Haggard's Disease, he writes his most powerful and universal story to date a tale of love both beautiful and bizarre. Dr. Edward Haggard is a tragic figure on a tiny scale. A lonely, pain-racked romantic, he stands at the window of his house on the edge of a cliff, watching as the clouds of war draw near, and reflecting on the nature of love, death, medicine, war but most of all on the wife of the senior pathologist, and the few brief months of bliss they shared. Shortly after the outbreak of World War II, a fighter pilot appears in Dr. Haggard's surgery, reawakening memories of the single grand passion of Haggard's life. For this young man is the son of the woman Haggard loved, and as the doctor becomes more and more intrigued by the bizarre changes occurring in his new patient's body, his old passion gives way to a fresh one, a passion altogether odder, and darker, than the first.
With the consummate artistry and profound understanding of the frontiers of human experience that he displayed in his previous work, Patrick McGrath brings to his narration of a doomed love affair and its bizarre aftermath an acute erotic intensity portraying a man whose disease is passion disease that can exalt a man, but can also destroy him.
Review
"McGrath carries on his winning streak....An unbearably memorable ending lifts this to classic level while the thin bright nerves of the storyline are padded with magnificent surgical detail, hospital lore, and moods you can rub your finger down." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"Patrick McGrath is a highly unusual and extraordinary writer." William Erbe
Review
"[A] stormy tale of obsession....An example of the psychological side of the gothic, this is a haunting portrayal of a man broken by passion. Recommended." Library Journal
Synopsis
This novel follows the life of Dr. Edward Haggard as he reflects on the nature of love, death, medicine, and war and his liaisons with a colleague's wife and a wartime lover.
About the Author
Patrick McGrath was born in London and grew up near Broadmoor Hospital, where for many years his father was medical superintendent. He is the author of Blood and Water and Other Tales, The Grotesque, Spider, Asylum and Martha Peake, and he was the co-editor, with Bradford Morrow, of The New Gothic. He lives in New York City and London, and is married to actress Maria Aitken.