Much Darker Days
A Christmas Annual with blood on its hands. Andrew Lang's vicious parody of Hugh Conway's sensation novel takes the genteel holiday tradition and drags it into the gutter, asking a question no Victorian moralist wanted to answer: can murder ever be justified? Philippa, 'the most beautiful murderess who ever crossed the pages of fiction,' has killed her abusive husband. Now the man who loves her must choose between turning her to the law or becoming an accomplice. The answer, of course, is chaos. What follows is a rollicking descent into deception, false identities, and increasingly absurd attempts to hide a corpse, as one man's love curdles into a prison of his own making. Lang wrote this as a send-up of the sensation novel's absurdities, but the satire cuts deeper than expected: the true folly isn't the murder, but the desperate masculine ego that thinks it can rewrite reality to protect a woman who never asked for salvation. Farce with teeth, and a reminder that Victorian England loved a good murder as much as it loved to moralize about them.
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Lang, Andrew. Much Darker Days. Lex, lex-books.com/book/much-darker-days-15bf2fbd-69fd-4145-a4cd-4afd61e91196.Lang, A. (n.d.). Much Darker Days. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/much-darker-days-15bf2fbd-69fd-4145-a4cd-4afd61e91196Lang, Andrew. Much Darker Days. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/much-darker-days-15bf2fbd-69fd-4145-a4cd-4afd61e91196.
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