The Lost - Hardcover

AYCLIFFE, Jonathan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0002252392 ISBN 13: 9780002252393

Publisher: Harper, 1996

Synopsis

From the author of The Matrix, a dark and absorbing tale of ancient evil in the modern age.

Jonathan Aycliffe's hardcover debut features prep school teacher, Michael Feraru, tired of his life, tired of his job, tired of dreary England. And though he doesn't know it yettired of his fiancee and her safe, undemanding love. When Michael takes a sabbatical and travels to Romania, he finds he is a titled lord, and morethe owner of an ancient stronghold in the Transylvanian Alps.

At Castel Vliacu, Michael becomes Count Mihai Vlahuta . . and discovers an evil far worse than mere vampires. And far, far more seductive.

About this title

Review:

Jonathan Aycliffe draws on the first part of Bram Stoker's Dracula for the bones of his story--a naive Englishman travels to a remote, forbidding castle in the mountains of Transylvania (postcommunist Romania)--and then fleshes it out with appealing characters and a different (but unabashedly gothic) plot. Aycliffe's writing is simple and fluid, concisely developing the shifting emotions and relationships as the dark underbelly of the story slowly reveals itself. The evil beings in The Lost are not vampires, but strigoļ--free-floating shades of an ancient family of lords. They die and yet don't decay. Their appetites are even more unspeakable than bloodsucking. As Gahan Wilson writes in Realms of Fantasy, "If you enjoy this sort of thing at all, you will have a fine, frightening time as Aycliffe hints at and then delivers nasty surprises, ghastly revelations, and increasingly appalling villainies."

From Kirkus Reviews:

In his hardcover debut, pseudonymous Cambridge professor Aycliffe (Night of the Apocalypse, 1995, etc., as Daniel Easterman) handily upgrades the vampire novel through fine writing and realism. While echoing the diaries and letters of Stoker's original, Aycliffe shores up fantasy with detail built richly from daily life. He begins with a tremendously attractive sense of humor and appealing characters--though humor fades as the creepy crawlies take over. A prep-school teacher in Cambridge, Michael Feraru, inherits Castle Vliacu, his family's fortress in the Transylvanian Alps and hopes to turn it into an orphanage for Romanian children. Delightful letters pass between Michael and his love, Sophie Wandless, back in Cambridge, as he describes his travels through Eastern Europe, his frustrating encounters with bureaucrats, and the gloomy life in today's Bucharest. Meanwhile, he hires a research assistant, Liliana, to help him establish his bona fides as the owner of Castle Vliacu. Materialistic Liliana and her secret boyfriend, however, hope to lead him into opening not an orphanage but rather a hotel at the castle, a business likely to reap great financial rewards. A grinding winter journey to the castle takes Michael and Liliana through villages where many peasants seem never to have seen a car. When their own breaks down, the two nearly die of exposure while plowing about a frigid countryside shadowed by wolves. After arriving at the castle on its beetling mountaintop, they find only an elderly blind woman and her son, who haven't left the site in 50 years. A fine library reveals much about the darkness underlying Michael's ancestors--and himself. At the time, sex blooms between Michael and Liliana, whisperings abound in empty rooms, and a ghost roams the corridors. Pale white wolves that are not wolves but strigoi, or the undead, pace the hills. And what will Michael find in the locked room in the cellar? Brevity breeds tight storytelling, with a final muted twist that proves just enough. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0002252392
• ISBN 13: 9780002252393
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 241