The Scarlet Empire - Style

Style

Though Parry was not a professional writer, his book is surprisingly well-done for an amateur. (In this respect, contrast Bradford Peck's contemporaneous The World a Department Store.) Parry imagines that Atlantis is heated and lit by the power of radium, and evocatively describes its "scintillating" light. He is good on the gloomy grandeur of the Atlantean realm, as when Walker first beholds the full scale of the city:

"It was as though we had stepped into some vast cathedral...I looked down a vista of titanic columns, which rose to a dome of immeasurable height. About each pillar ran a line of light — a shining vine — winding upward until its brilliancy contracted to a thread and lost itself in the upper air. The dome was faintly disclosed by lights which shed their rays like distant stars...and in this half-light the columns shimmered like colored marble and were dimly mirrored in the smooth and glossy flooring of the mighty naves. At intervals, running transversely across the vista down which I looked, were channels from which shone forth floods of light, and these channels I came afterward to know to be the streets of Atlantis. In the day-dreams of my boyhood I had often pictured sea caverns with crystal walls and sweeping distances, but no stretch of my imagination was ever comparable to the reality that now confronted me."

Indeed, John Clute and John Grant, in their Encyclopedia of Fantasy, suggest that the novel was perhaps ghost-written.