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Summary
Summary
The famed poet Lord Byron comes to life with incendiary brilliance in this ingenious and entertaining brew of sensationalism and scholarship (Sunday Times London), enhanced by vivid period settings that evoke Caleb Carr's The Alienist. Wandering with his friend Hobhouse in Greece, Byron embarks on a life of adventure even his genius could not have forseen--that of the world's most formidable vampire.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Lord Byron as a vampire? That notion may not explain the aberrant behavior of the much-revered Romantic poet, but it definitely provides a racy foundation for Holland's engaging and sophisticated debut novel. The story begins in London in the present, as lovely young Rebecca Carville petitions her lawyer for the keys to the family crypt, where she hopes to find the sole existing copy of Byron's memoirs. Instead, she finds Byron himself, who proceeds to tell her the story of how he became a vampire during his journey to Greece. The first half of Byron's account remains within the conventions of the horror genre, as the great poet desperately fights the efforts of the powerful Greek vardoulacha, who eventually drains his blood. Once Byron begins to explore his new nature, however, Holland embarks on a remarkable literary journey, touching on how the poet's burden might have affected his relationships with the women in his life as well as his problematic dealings with Shelley. Other subplots recall the early Anne Rice novels, particularly the sections in which Byron tries to unite the vampires and help the Greeks in their revolt against the Turks. But the most compelling portions of the book probe the links between blood and family that surface when Byron discovers that he must take the life of a relative in order to maintain his youthful beauty. Both the period detail and the biographical material are exquisitely rendered, and the shocking revelation that brings the story full circle and places Rebecca Carville in extreme peril makes for a nice surprise ending. With this striking, highly original debut, Holland offers a valuable addition to the vampire legend. 75,000 first printing; $100,000 ad/promo; BOMC and QPB selection; simultaneous Simon & Schuster Audio. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Gothic Sturm and Drang by British scholar Holland, whose first novel tells how a 19-year-old Lord Byron becomes emperor of the planet's vampires. In today's London, Rebecca Carville, her auburn hair spilling and aglow, searches for Byron's lost papers: and, entering the tomb of her relative Lord Ruthven, is gripped by weird forces that lead her to Byron himself, still alive. Byron tells her the story of his induction as Lord of the Dead in Albania, where he slew the previous Lord, Vakehl Pasha, and unwittingly took on the mantle of top bloodsucker. Byron, in the tale he tells, falls for Vakehl's slave Haidée, who dies, or so Byron thinks as he mourns her throughout his return to England. As his own physical beauty coarsens amid riotous bloodlettings, Byron finds that the only way to get on the wagon again is to drink the ``golden'' blood of his own child or of a family member such as his half-sister Augusta, a horror he resists despite his incest with her and his convulsive appetite. Back on the Continent, he tries to draw Shelley into his empire, but Shelley would rather drown . . . . As a genre work, this is better than many. Holland's Byron is a manic-depressive whose bouts of despair--often on horseback and draped with rain and storm--are indistinguishable from the mercurial moods of the usual 19th-century Romantic hero. Style and storytelling both hit their stride as Byron sinks more deeply into his vampirism and as happy inventions arise from his subconscious: When visiting the fields of Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo, the poet finds himself viewing ragged ghost battalions at war as he walks through soggy earth still pumping with blood. Attractive figures in living pasteboard, yes, but a sequel seems likely, as long as Byron still lives and longs to escape eternity. (First printing of 75,000; Book-of-the-Month Club alternate; Quality Paperback Book Club featured alternate; $100,000 ad/promo)
Booklist Review
The modern figure of the vampire--aristocratically domineering, supersensitive, accursed, fatally attractive, simultaneously loving and hating life--is based so much on the Romantic literary figure of the damned hero that is called, after its most famous popularizer, Byronic, that this contemporary gothic shocker in which Byron himself is a vampire had to be written sooner or later. Holland has very little to do creatively; he just projects the incidents, attitudes, and methods of vampire yarns, from Dracula to Interview with the Vampire, upon the tenor and themes of Byron's writings (which are liberally excerpted for epigraphs to this book's chapters), and--voila!--he has a thoroughly marketable piece of pop lit that has already fared so well in Britain that Pocket Books is giving it a big-splash launching in America. It may well duplicate its British success here, for it has plenty of the elements--mucking about in the mountainous, gloomy Balkans; S&M-tinged seductions both hetero-and homosexual; shambling, rotting zombies doing vampiric masters' biddings; blood-and-gore-laden violence; world-weary posturing by the bloodsucking heroes; genuine historical characters in its cast--common in the current spate of vampire romances. But Holland's style is more like Poe's as rewritten by some hack historical novelist than Byron's. Those who crave real literary distinction from the vampire subgenre should be directed to Perucho's Natural History (U.S. ed., 1989) on the high end of the cultural brow, to King's Salem's Lot on the low. (Reviewed December 15, 1995)0671534254Ray Olson
Library Journal Review
Noted poet Lord Byron recounts to a frightened young woman the harrowing events that led to his becoming a vampire of tremendous power, a true Lord of the Dead. While traveling through 19th-century Greece, he was befriended by a centuries-old Turk, who first lured him into the vampire life and then seemingly murdered the one woman Byron had ever loved, the beautiful slave Haidee. Holland's uneven first novel closely follows the actual events of Byron's life. It also adds an interesting slant on the vampire world by exploring its darker side. Interwoven throughout is a sad and strange love story. Most fiction collections will want to acquire this BOMC and QPB selection.Patricia Altner, Information Seekers, Bowie, Md. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
