Hide Me Among the Graves

Tim Powers has written two of the best speculative fiction books I've ever read--Last Call and The Anubis Gates. I also read his book Declare, which I found to be very confusing. Unfortunately, his latest, Hide Me Among the Graves, is in the latter category.

I was sure I was going to love it. It's about the Rosettis, Christina and Gabriel, who were real life literary figures in Victorian England, being haunted by the ghost of their uncle, John Polidori, who wrote the first vampire novel (one that he concocted on the same night in Switzerland that Mary Shelley dreamed up Frankenstein). Full of spooky London nights and spectral figures, it seemed like a natural for me.

All that was there, but I didn't feel the book ever take off. It was like a prolonged tease, and there was a lot of characters running around, doing this that and the other thing but never really grabbing my attention.

Other real-life figures who are in the book are poet Algernon Swinburne and a friend of Shelley and Byron's, Edward Trelawney, who is a link between the living and the dead. We also get, strangely, Boadicea, the anti-Roman revolutionary, who is some sort of ghost who can appear very tall or very small. There is also the ghost of Elizabeth Siddal's unborn child. She was Gabriel Rosetti's wife. When she died he buried her poems with her body, and later dug them up. In Hide Me Among the Graves, the reason is quite different.

To motor the plot along are fictional characters--John Crawford, a veterinarian, and Adelaide McKee, a former prostitute. They have a daughter together, and they are trying to save her from Polidori, who wants to marry her off to the unborn son. It's all very ghoulish, but there are so many balls in the air that I just couldn't get sucked in by the story, and by the end I was just waiting for it to be over.

Some of the prose is good gaslight stuff, such as: "'Night is your time now,' said the thing that was Polidori, with the remembered dark hair and mustache and deep-set eyes. 'You'll come to hate daylight. Your place by day will be among the tombs, and the regions under the tombs, but by night you will be a citizen of every place under the moon."

Nicely worked prose, but the plot just didn't do it for me.