A psychological thriller before its time, James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, published in 1824, takes us back to the world of 18th-century Scotland, into a mind haunted by religious obsession, and driven to commit murder. The events are told from several different viewpoints, so that truth and reality appear to dissolve in this disturbing story of the dark legacy of Calvinist doctrine, and the madness to which it led one man. Misunderstood and neglected for more than a century, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner is now regarded as a classic of the supernatural, comparable with Frankenstein, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, or Dracula.
