Reviews of Parricide
"Sumptuously illustrated, sumptuously written.
The pleasures of children's books for grim-minded grown-ups."
"Major’s latest novel - or, as he says, his latest Gothic fairy-tale for adults - Parricide is a wintry book, about bull-fighting, the Manchester Blitz, Dominican friars,
ossifrages, the Princes in the Tower (the appalling truth can be told at last),
about high table, mother-, father-, sister- and nephew-slaying;
all of it illustrated with Victorian photographs, and a bosky map by Alack Newman.
Ideal reading (and looking) for decadents everywhere."
"The action of Parricide, which takes place over Christmas,
seems informed by a moral seriousness underlying the wildest comic novelist working in English today."
"This is a well-ordered labyrinth of tales, all centred on the reprobate killer-intellectual Culpepper. It's
more than a historical novel, although it has a commanding sweep in time
(from the present to the Spanish Civil War, the Middle Ages and the Victorians)
and place (from Cambridge to the African jungle and the Scottish isles) ...."