Doom

Despite its bleak title, Doom is William Gerhardie's most wildly funny novel. It is the story of Frank Dickin, an impoverished young novelist, and his involvement, on the one hand, with an eccentric family of Russian émigrés—in particular, their beautiful daughter Eva—and, on the other, with an all-powerful newspaper magnate, Lord Ottercove, who takes Dickin on as a lost cause. This irrepressible comic potpourri also involves a mad English lord who is bent on destroying the world, and with an outrageous sleight of hand that only Gerhardie could manage, the novel slowly slips from social comedy toward apocalypse.