Dr. Haggard’s Disease

In two novels and one short story collection, Patrick McGrath has established himself as the foremost master of the “new gothic.” He has been compared by The New York Times to Poe, Wilde, Kafka, and Robert Louis Stevenson and hailed as “an ingenious manipulator of discomfort and suspense.” In Dr. Haggard’s Disease, he writes his most powerful and universal story to date — a tale of love both beautiful and bizarre.

Dr. Edward Haggard is a tragic figure on a tiny scale. A lonely, pain-racked romantic, he stands at the window of his house on the edge of a cliff, watching as the clouds of war draw near, and reflecting on the nature of love, death, medicine, war — but most of all on the wife of the senior pathologist, and the few brief months of bliss they shared.

Shortly after the outbreak of World War II, a fighter pilot appears in Dr. Haggard’s surgery, reawakening memories of the single grand passion of Haggard’s life. For this young man is the son of the woman Haggard loved, and as the doctor becomes more and more intrigued by the bizarre changes occurring in his new patient’s body, his old passion gives way to a fresh one, a passion altogether odder, and darker, than the first.

With the consummate artistry and profound understanding of the frontiers of human experience that he displayed in his previous work, Patrick McGrath brings to his narration of a doomed love affair and in bizarre aftermath an acute erotic intensity portraying a man whose disease is passion — disease that can exalt a man, but can also destroy him.