Lord of the Dead: The Secret History of Byron - Hardcover

Holland, Tom

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0671534254 ISBN 13: 9780671534257

Publisher: Pocket Books, 1996

Synopsis

From the Levant to London's society salons to the canals of Venice, famed poet Lord Byron embarks on a life of adventure as the world's most notable vampire, following a dark trail of long-hidden secrets, ancient black arts, and the depths of evil. BOMC & QPB.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

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.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist:

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. Ray Olson

About this edition

• Publisher: Pocket Books
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0671534254
• ISBN 13: 9780671534257
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 324