The Lost - Hardcover

Aycliffe, Jonathan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0061052256 ISBN 13: 9780061052255

Publisher: Harper Prism, 1996

Synopsis

Tired of his life as a prep school teacher in England, Michael moves to Romania to reclaim his grandparents' land, discovers that he is a titled lord, and learns of an ancient evil.

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 AudioFile:

A British professor visits the ancestral home in Transylvania, now part of post-Communist Romania, with eerie consequences. Written in an epistolary style purposely harkening back to Stoker's DRACULA, this spookfest adds modern riffs, dimensional characters and a sense of humor to the Gothic tradition. Narrator Kay nicely orchestrates tension and vivifies the characters. Though never sluggish, he is particularly measured, sometimes infuriatingly so. However, that is a minor flaw in an otherwise entirely satisfactory thriller. Y.R. © AudioFile 2000, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Prism
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0061052256
• ISBN 13: 9780061052255
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 166