Title: Irritatingly pretentious and excessively gruesome
Review: The Dress Lodger is one of the bleakest books I have ever read. The story is dark and lacking in any kind of subtlety, the descriptions of grave-robbing, autopsies, and death from cholera are morose and gruesome, and the characters are unrelentingly unsympathetic and grotesque. Moreover, there is too much going on in the story. There are too many lives whose stories are being told, too many points of view. The author seems to tell the story both through the eyes of different characters and through the eyes of an omiscient narrator whose identity, when revealed, is simply unbelievable. By the time I reached the book's inconclusive conclusion, and realized that I didn't really care about any of its characters, I felt manipulated and just plain annoyed.
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