Mister Memory - Marcus Sedgwick
As an award-winning writer of fiction for young adults and children, Marcus Sedgwick's books - just to go by the titles, as I haven't read them - seem to have always had a taste for the macabre and the gothic, but his work in adult fiction is also proving to be just as twisted and imaginative. Sedgwick's first work for a more mature readership Love Like Blood (2014) managed to find an original spin on vampire lore, linking it to various Christian rituals in post-war Paris. Rather than cower before the cross, these vampires actually worshipped it. Paris and certain gothic practices are also to the fore in his second work of adult fiction, Mister Memory . The location and the period evoke this quality on their own, set in Belle Epoque Paris in 1899, in the seedy haunts of the brothels, cabarets and pornographer's dens of Pigaille, Montmartre and the Moulin Rouge. Locked up in the asylum of Salpêtrière is Marcel Després, also known in one of the lesser cabarets as Marcel...