The Demise of Alice - 6955

Perez’s prose is a cinematic montage delivered in flashes, each vignette offering an image of life beneath the glowing sphere of the Louisiana moon. We watch, enraptured, as the novel’s protagonist Alice moves through smoke-filled speakeasies, antiquated cemeteries, the grotesque docks where illicit shipments arrive beneath clouds of pollution, and an apothecary shop owned by a descendent of Marie Laveau. All the while, she attempts to hold intact a coherent life while parsing the fine lines between love and seduction, violence and necessity, fascination and compulsion. Drawing on the American genres of Southern Noir and the Gothic epitomized by Anne Rice and savoring the same brutality and shock as recent writers like Ottessa Moshfegh, Perez’s novel wrestles with the concepts of evil and inheritance, predation and power, addiction in its many orders, and the mythologies of the Gulf Coast. Here is a love letter to the characters of the genre: the gangsters and demons, ghosts and hauntings, tarot readers, alchemists, and spiritual conduits, not to mention all the assorted lunacies, obsessions, and desires that have occupied mystery tales and its readers from Gothic fiction to film noir to today. Evelyn Grace Vex was the pen name of Grace Hannah Perez. Perez used her voice across many forms of creative expression from writing to painting and the modeling of clothing. Her novel returns us to her favorite city, New Orleans, toward the end of the 1920s.
ASIN: 1963280997
VSKU: BVV.1963280997.VG
Condition: Very Good
Author/Artist:Vex, Evelyn Grace
Binding: Hardcover