I cannot tell you what After Me Comes the Flood is about. I genuinely have no idea. The story made no sense to me and it got to the point where I was just reading the words and not even taking them in. I’m sure that there was a bigger message, an allegory or extended metaphor but I could not see it.

After Me Comes the Flood was not the best book I have read.

After Me Comes the Flood by Sarah Perry is available now.

For more information regarding Serpent’s Tail (@serpentstail) please visit www.bit.ly/signupST.

I really didn't get on well with this book. The prose is so beautiful and I loved a lot of the ideas, but I found the narrative dull and it makes a lot of promises that don't pay off. I won't be publicly reviewing this as I really like Sarah Perry and don't want to tear apart a debut (unless it really deserves it, which this book doesn't). I'll read her future books, but this just didn't work for me.

A strange, frustrating, sometimes alluring first novel

I came to After Me Comes The Flood on the back of the exuberance and inventive delight of Perry’s second novel, The Essex Serpent.

Perry’s first book in some ways shows it is just that, clinging a little too closely to a creative writing course, composed of some excellent ideas, evident depth and craft, but not quite seamlessly connecting and connected.

John Cole, a melancholy bookseller, ups sticks from London and drives to Norfolk to see his brother. A mishap on the journey means that he wanders into something with more than a whiff of Susan Hill’s watery ghost story territory.

Cole by chance ends up in a strange, isolated landscape, at a country house – so we have two literary tropes in one, really : maybe a ghost story, maybe a country house murder, maybe something altogether more literary, some strange, dream-like, how-did-I-find-this piece of Le Grand Meaulnes-ish lost domain. Cole seems to be expected at the strange house, greeted with relief, called by his name. Yet he has never met any of the residents before. Exhausted, cold and hungry he accepts the hospitality offered, but does not reveal that he is not the expected guest.

For reasons not wholly credible, except, perhaps he is a little seduced by the hypnotic, literary tropes, or the strange house and its stranger occupants, not to mention a kind of soporific inertia in his own nature, John stays, not just for dinner, not just for the night, though he agonises, in a journal he begins to keep, detailing everything which is happening. A conceit just a little too implausible, outside the fact that clearly the writer needed to find some way to continue to narrative.

Slowly the real purpose and meaning of the house become clear, and so does the oddness of the residents

Perry is strong on atmosphere, and the device of the isolated house, and the stranger coming to the door, is a powerful one. There are odd threads a dangling which never really get properly dealt with – for example, the ‘real’ expected visitor whom John has decided to pretend to be. Not everything in a book needs to be tied up neatly, but if a thread is constantly wafted in front of the reader’s attention, it should be resolved in some way.

There is a lot I did like in this, and perhaps, mostly, it was the idea of Perry going on to refine and develop her skills. This was a little too much like a novelist in process on a not quite finished exercise.

3 ½ rounded up to 4