The Stress of Her Regard

by Tim Powers

World Fantasy Award Winner

Michael Crawford is forced to flee when discovers his bride brutally murdered in their wedding bed. Yet it is not the revengeful townspeople he fears but the deadly embrace of the malignant spirit that is claiming him as her bridegroom.

But Crawford will not travel alone; soon he is aided by his fellow victims, the greatest poets of his day?, Byron, Keats, and Shelley. Together they embark upon a desperate journey, crisscrossing Europe and battling the vampiric fiend who seeks her ultimate pleasure in their ravaged bodies and imperiled souls.

Telling a secret history of passion and terror, Tim Powers ( The Anubis Gates , Declare , Three Days to Never ) masterfully recasts the tragic lives of the Romantics into a uniquely frightening tale. Back in print for the first time since 1994, this newly revised edition of The Stress of Her Regard will thrill both Powers fans and newcomers to this gripping Gothic tour de force.

Genres: Fantasy, Horror, Historical Fiction, Fiction, Vampires, Historical, Historical Fantasy

427 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Timothy Thomas Powers is an American science fiction and fantasy author. Powers has won the World Fantasy Award twice for his critically acclaimed novels Last Call and Declare.

Most of Powers's novels are "secret histories": he uses actual, documented historical events featuring famous people, but shows another view of them in which occult or supernatural factors heavily influence the motivations and actions of the characters.


Powers was born in Buffalo, New York, and grew up in California, where his Roman Catholic family moved in 1959.

He studied English Literature at Cal State Fullerton, where he first met James Blaylock and K.W. Jeter, both of whom remained close friends and occasional collaborators; the trio have half-seriously referred to themselves as "steampunks" in contrast to the prevailing cyberpunk genre of the 1980s. Powers and Blaylock invented the poet William Ashbless while they were at Cal State Fullerton.

Another friend Powers first met during this period was noted science fiction writer Philip K. Dick; the character named "David" in Dick's novel VALIS is based on Powers and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Blade Runner) is dedicated to him.

Powers's first major novel was The Drawing of the Dark (1979), but the novel that earned him wide praise was The Anubis Gates, which won the Philip K. Dick Award, and has since been published in many other languages.

Powers also teaches part-time in his role as Writer in Residence for the Orange County High School of the Arts where his friend, Blaylock, is Director of the Creative Writing Department. Powers and his wife, Serena, currently live in Muscoy, California. He has frequently served as a mentor author as part of the Clarion science fiction/fantasy writer's workshop.

He also taught part time at the University of Redlands.

Excerpted from Wikipedia.

Reviews

[karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

this will be my goodreads reading challenge goal-meeting book!! unless i change my goal again. but i don't have much time left...

real review:



'twas the week before christmas and all through the apartment, not a creature was stirring except for this varmint.



he jumped onto the bed and slapped me in the face and said - "reading the same book for a week? let's pick up the pace!!"



he continued his abuse, kicking me in the spine, and eventually gave up any pretense of rhyme.



seriously - it took me nearly a week to finish this book. and it's not entirely my fault - between baking and shopping and wrapping and being worn down to a nubbin from retail christmas overwork, there has just been little to no time for leisure reading. the times and places i usually carved out for such pursuits seemed to be replaced by power naps or quiet but sustained groaning as all the muscles in my legs locked up. plus the print was small. get off my lawn!

but enough about my problems, even though since i haven't reviewed in a week, i assume you have all been missing me like crazy and want to know every last sensation i have experienced in our time apart.

here i am.

man, it took me a while to get into this book. at first, i was scratching my head saying, "why have all my friends given this such high ratings?? it is good, but it isn't amazing...."

but finally, something clicked. and it was probably just my aforementioned distractions and abbreviated attention-span, and my compromised death-in-waking state for much of the week holding me back for the first half of the book.

because this book is very good. and this author has done his byron-scholarship, thank god.

the best thing about this book is that it actually does seem to interlock with the known facts of the relationship between shelley and byron and, to a lesser extent trelawney, polidori, and keats. and some hunt. and a mention of hobhouse.the facts are all there, and this book just fills in the gaps and shifts the motivations somewhat.

but byron is wonderful in it - not the cookie cutter evil genius he so frequently is in he hands of authors, or as the reverse - a misunderstood sweetie-pie hiding behind aggressive acts because he wants to be looooved. this was a perfect representation for me - an actual human-shaped character instead of an icon. even shelley is given nobility, in a way that makes me finally able to respect him. so, basically, what i am saying is that i have decided to treat this novel as true-biography, vampires and all. the poetry chosen as chapter-headers seems to support my decision; that there was this whole secret underworld to which the great poets belonged - enhancing their poetry and draining them of their humanity, coursing through the subtext of their words in coded confessions.

additionally, there are some wonderful gruesome moments, and i do appreciate an author who doesn't mind putting his characters through the wringer, both physically and emotionally. no one gets out unscathed, and there are so many unexpected outcomes.still ashamed that it took me so long to read it, but i am very pleased otherwise. one of the better "books starring byron."

thank you, tim powers.
and thank you, maureen!

come to my blog!

[K.J. Charles]

This is a rage review.

I'm at 27% on this book. The premise is that lots of men are victims of lamia, which are sexy female vampires who forcibly "marry" them (or claim them as part of a birth process), and go on to bleed them dry and ruin their lives. But they are so sexy the men just can't help themselves, they just *have* to have sex with them and then they get bled dry as a result. COULD IT BE A METAPHOR IDK WHAT DOES IT MEAN.

So far the only woman with a speaking part who isn't a sexy vampire, prostitute, lunatic, stock barmaid (sexy), or murderer is Mary Shelley. She gets to quote several lines of Shakespeare (a man). Woop! That's literally it for women being allowed to speak. However, it has been made clear she didn't invent the idea for Frankenstein after all. Oh and the protagonist has not one but two wives who unfairly ruined his life by being murdered. The inconsiderate cows. But at least he didn't love them so, could be worse.

What's making me really angry isn't particularly this book, although it is making me very angry. It's that I spent my youth reading books like this and never noticed because it was just standard fantasy, it happened *all the time*. Tim Powers is an excellent author. I adored Anubis Gates and Last Call, both of which had female protagonists. I don't think this book was intended to be a misogynistic blast against women; I don't think the author thought about it at all. It's just bog standard for 1980s/90s fantasy, and better than much. And I and hundreds of thousands of other teenage girls just soaked it the hell up.

I was going to keep reading because it is well written and Powers can tell a story but actually, you know what, I have Becky Chambers and Kij Johnson and Martha Wells and Nicky Drayden and Lauren Beukes in my TBR so ***screw this shit***. DNF, which stands for Die Now in a Fire.

eta: I swear to God, if anyone comes on this review to stan for Powers or tell me I had to finish reading this book, I will not be responsible for the consequences.

[Jeffrey Keeten · Rating 5 out of 5]

”Quaff while thou canst: another race,
When thou and thine, like me, are sped,
May rescue thee from Earth’s embrace,
And rhyme and revel with the dead.
-Lord Byron
“Lines Inscribed upon
a Cup Formed
from a Skull”

Anybody who has spent any time in an English Literature department at a University will find that even though the centennial of Lord Byron’s death is fast approached women still find him fascinating and men still attempt to emulate him.


Lord Byron, those curls made women swoon.

He was the quintessential bad boy; rebelling against....well what have you got; drinking copious amounts of alcohol; sleeping with whoever took his fancy...married, young, old, sister; he was athletic renown for his talent for swimming and boxing; he was a man untethered by the normal restraints of a man of his generation or for that matter any generation. Scandal followed him everywhere he went and finally caught up with him when he paused long enough for rumor to arrive. It is so funny to think of those Yale boys in the Skull and Bones club drinking from a skull cup imagining that they are Lord Byron even though all of them lack the imagination or the audacity to ever be as larger than life than the 5’8” club footed Bryon. Walking with a limp might have held some men back, but it only added to Byron’s mystic.

”In the wind there is a voice
Shall forbid thee to rejoice;
And to thee shall Night deny
All the quiet of her sky;
And the day shall have a sun,
Which shall make thee wish it done.
-Lord Bryon, Manfred

There is a reason why Byron is on the run. He is being pursued, hounded, chased from one great city to the next by a race of beings as old as the earth that he refers to as the Nephilim which means “to fall” or “to cause to fall”. John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley are also fleeing the same creatures. One benefit of being under of the spell of the creatures is the whispered words from their lips that put poetry in the minds of the men.

Because of numerous ailments brought on by a combination of genetics and hard living, Byron traveled with a personal physician named John William Polidori. A doctor who dreams of being a poet and believes by being around Byron and his circle of talented writers that some of their talent will rub off on him. He was present on that famous evening in 1816 when Byron challenged the group to write ghost stories. The most famous document to emerge from that evening was Mary Shelley's book Frankenstein, but Polidori also made a contribution to literature from that challenge publishing the first vampire story published in English The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre.


Doctor Polidori a man intent on learning the secret of poetry at any cost.

Our story really begins with Dr. Michael Crawford, a man on the verge of pulling his life back together. He is to be married to the fair Julie and having one disastrous marriage on his resume he is determined to make sure this one is successful. The night before the nuptials he is in an inn accompanied by his best man. They are flirting with serving wenches and drinking too much as seems to be the practice of many men the day before they get married. In the course of helping his friend back inside the inn after a drunken sprawl in the courtyard Crawford places the ring intended for his beloved on the finger of a statue to keep it safe. When he returns to retrieve the ring the hand of the statue has closed and despite his best efforts he can not pry the fingers apart to repossess the ring. Little does he know that a pact has been made and now he is a target for the same creatures pursuing Byron.

”But the worm shall revive thee with kisses,
Thous shalt change and transmute as a god
As the rod to a serpent that hisses,
As the serpent again to a rod.
They life shall not cease though thou doff it;
Thou shalt live until evil be slain,
And good shall die first, said they prophet,
Our Lady of Pain.
-A. C. Swinburne, Dolores

So what do these creatures look like?

”Tonight she seemed to come in as a mist between the casements, but she was in her human form by the time he looked fully at her. She was naked, as always before, and he was so dazzled by the sight of her that he hardly noticed her arm snake out and turn his shaving mirror to face the wall. When her white fingers reached out and unbuttoned his shirt, and his lungs seemed to clog full with ice when her cold nipples pressed against his chest. He fell backwards onto the bed and she followed and straddled him.... Now she went down to give him a passionate kiss--her hair fell in coils around his ears, and he abandoned himself to her.

Her flesh warmed around him as the hours were achingly chiselled away, and when at last she rose from the bed she was actually glowing faintly, like the bricks lining a smithy’s stove.She leaned down and took his limp hand as if to kiss it, but when she lifted it to her lips it was only to bite the stump of his missing finger. The blood spurted rackingly into her mouth, and the strained bed-joints squealed as he convulsed into unconsciousness.

And.

”The thing was clinging upside down to the trunk, its projecting snout only a few feet above his face. It had no eyes, nor even eye sockets, and its corrugated gray hide and anvil-shaped face were anything but mobile, but he could tell that he had excited its profoundest attention. a mouth opened under the snout, exposing teeth like petrified plates of tree fungus, and the creature began to stretch its neck downward.”

They can also become a winged serpent. ”It curled heavily in the air, its metallic-looking scales glittering in the torchlight. Its long snout opened, showing a white brush of teeth.

Polidori despondent about his inability to be a great poet, beset with debts and depression commits suicide giving himself over to the Nephilim. They can assume any form to inspire fear or lust in the individuals they are pursuing. The resurrected Polidori, a form now favored by the Nephilim, is intent not only in controlling the poets, but also killing their wives, sisters, children removing any obstacles from complete devotion from their subjects. They are almost impossible to kill and Byron, Crawford, Shelley, and Keats find themselves in a desperate battle to break their connection with the creatures before everyone they love is destroyed.

”Crawford was holding the jar of Byron’s blood in one hand and Shelley’s charred, paper-wrapped heart in the other. The poets return, he thought nervously.”

Tim Powers is so imaginative and always pushes the boundaries with soaring ideas and brain warping strange concoctions of speculative prose. He took the tragic lives of these romantic poets and plausibly creates a world where an ancient race of vampires are the source of their talent, and how the strength of this stalwart band of poets to resist these necrophiliac muses leads to their premature deaths. If their poetry seems otherworldly you might come away believing some of this tale to be true.


Tim Powers

Tim Powers is the only writer I know that signs his books upside down. He must be different in all things he does.

Tim Powers signed this book for me and even sketched a face because he is just that damn cool.

If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten

[Lizz · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don’t write reviews.

Powers writes with the capacity to move one’s heart. His talent for crafting words into experiences is incredible.

“The thing was getting closer and the shifting roar of its breathing now sounded like a distant valley-filling orchestra. Was the thing singing? Crawford found himself following the theme and the tragic grandeur of it caught at the breath in his throat. Lyrics sprang spontaneously into his mind, coruscating tapestries of languages as intricate as the depths of an opal and it seemed to him that this must be some antediluvian march, composed by sentient planets to celebrate a wedding of suns. But the music was fading, as if a wind had sprung up between himself and the vast, but far, distant orchestra.”

I know the basic story of the lives of Shelley and Lord Byron so it was very interesting to see how Powers created an alternate history for them. As I was reading I did more research into other characters who appeared in the story and were real people. He did a lovely job working the authentic writings and facts into his fantasy tale. I almost forgot how much I dislike the people he wrote about. They became heroic when in life they were philanderers and narcissists.

I must also applaud his creation of the world of the nephilim and their human worshippers. Using mythology and theology, Powers made a compelling vampire tale. The theme of addiction on the part of the victim was especially interesting.

But whiny old me had some issues with this story because I must complain always. The modern style in which the characters spoke was a bit off-putting. The way everything blended into everything else perfectly was a mite contrived. The long build-up to the climax was slightly too long. I felt by that point we had gone through it all too many times. The characters being horribly injured and maimed, repeatedly was kind of too much.

[Mike (the Paladin) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Odd book this. It's very interesting and very well written. I go only three stars on it because the interest (at least my interest) wains badly at places in the book.

This is in "a way" a vampire story. As is so often the case today the author rewrites the vampire myth tying it in with or more correctly making it hybrid with several other legends from myth, folklore and fiction. This isn't a bad thing.

at least he didn't go the route of friendly helpful vampires...I really don't care for that.

The weakness here seems to me that while the book is enthralling the "quests" of our protagonist(s) manage to spin the story out into too many threads chasing down the facts about the "creatures" and trying to find their weaknesses and how to either defeat them or at least get out from under their sway.

Taking place about the time Mary Shelly wrote Frankenstein. Percy and Mary Shelly, Lord Byron, Polidori, John Keats and their "Romantic" contemporaries are among our protagonists. We'll follow them around the Romance world and find out what was "really" going on. We'll get the story behind the story of Frankenstein. This is not badly handled. As I said there are places where it sort of, "winds" out of control and the story wanders. Beside this and the fact that these are not actually very likable people (even our primary protagonist) the feel of reality manages to come across in a "misty night" sort of way.

This may be a personal observation as this period and the Romantic writers always give me a feel of misty reality...so.

Let me say that again I wish I had more room in the rating system. This is a rather high 3 (maybe three gold stars rather than silver?) or the 3.5 we all talk about. A book can get a 3 from me if it hits a point of indifference. That's not the case I did like this book...I enjoyed this book but it did leave me yawning from time to time. So for the yawn factor I think i have to go 3 stars, but it's a "good 3). I can with some reservations recommend it so...almost a 4.

Enjoy.

[Glen Engel-Cox · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you have yet to discover Powers, what a treat awaits you! For those of you who have read his earlier work, such as The Anubis Gates and On Stranger Tides, I know I'll be preaching to the converted when I say that Powers is one of the most exciting authors writing fantasy today. He is one of the progenitors of the "gonzo" fantasy, a style in which the author uses actual history for the majority of the plot, but inserts fantastic elements that explain actions left mysterious by time and which will provide the details of the story. K.W. Jeter and James P. Blaylock, friends of Powers', have also written stories in this style, and Bruce Sterling and William Gibson are working on one called The Difference Engine. But gonzo fantasy is Powers' ballgame, and he's still batting 1.000.

The Stress of Her Regard is set in the time of those three happy-go-lucky but yet melancholy poets, the Romantics. No, not the rock group, but Lord Byron, Percy Shelly, and John Keats. Powers has once again picked his time period and historical people well--there are few people as full of life and mystery as these three poets. Byron, Shelly and Keats were the original Beat writers, travelling the world and putting what they saw into their fiction and poetry long before Jack Keroauc.

The main character isn't a poet, though, but a doctor named Michael Crawford. Having already suffered the death of his first wife and his younger brother, the book opens with Crawford's marriage to his second wife and her brutal death beside him in bed on their first night as man and wife. Blamed for his wife's death, and laboring under the absence of his own memory of that night, Crawford flees into hiding. But Crawford is hunted, not only with guilt for the deaths of those close to him, but also by strangely erotic dreams, and hounded by the sister of his second wife. His escape from both of these are interlocked with the poetry and lives of the Romantics. You mention fantasy to some people, and they have a hard time not relating it with Tolkien or Dungeons & Dragons. Powers' fiction isn't one style alone. The Stress of Her Regard is a perfect example of this. Not only does it predispose some knowledge of the work of the three poets, but it also has horrific undertones that threaten to explode into the forefront a la Stephen King.

Powers' previous novels have also played fast and loose with historical characters, but those characters have always remained in the background, as if Powers was wary that the "real" characters would destroy the fabric of his half-real fantasy world. In The Stress of Her Regard, though, Powers bravely tackles using the historical characters to become major forces of the storyline. In fact, the intriguing ambiguous yet always exciting Byron steals the book from Crawford, who seems to be a rudderless boat on a swift moving river. And although Byron falls victim to the lamias, his struggle and fall are the stuff that climaxes are built of, rather than Crawford's selfless struggle to rescue his wife's sister.

Not as pyrotechnic as The Anubis Gates, nor as perverse as Dinner at Deviant's Palace, nor as playful as On Stranger Tides , what distinguishes The Stress of Her Regard is the consistent tone of the novel--a spiralling descent into the insanity of creative genius, and the redemption of love.

[Theo Logos · Rating 4 out of 5]

It occurred to him that he now knew something that perhaps no one else in the world did — that there was no curse more horrible than, “May your daughter die and be made into a puppet which finds disfavor before an audience of Austrian soldiers.”

Tim Powers crafted an incredibly busy and complex novel in The Stress of Her Regard. It’s historical fiction, hidden history, action adventure, and above all, occult horror. By far the most horrific of all his novels, in it Powers explores his original take on the vampire tale — a chillingly weird amalgamation of the Hebrew Nethilim, Greek Lamia, muses, succubus, and an occult potpourri of various other folklore — creating a uniquely uncanny and terrifying monster.

Powers weaves his horrific vampire tale around the tragical lives (and deaths) of the Romantic Poets. Lord Byron, Percy and Mary Shelley, John Keats, Leigh Hunt, and other friends and hangers on like John Trelawny, and John William Polidori make up his cast of characters, and he explains the actual tragic and unusual details of their lives as a hidden history of their interaction with an occult and hidden world of ancient vampiric monsters.

Powers added a tragic protagonist of his own creation, surgeon Michael Crawford, to this historical cast, who suffers more horrific trauma and tragedy, perhaps, than all the rest. Powers is relentless, moving his characters from one gruesome and horrific episode to another, putting them through more horror, both physical and mental, than a body should be able to stand. Like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, his characters are relentlessly stripped of all they hold dear.

None of the characters in The Stress of Her Regard are particularly sympathetic. The historical poets suffer from vanity and self absorption, though they can also be loyal and generous at times. Michael Crawford is a particularly complex character, who remains strangely remote, and despite several laudable qualities, he is often nearly unbearable. This, the fact that the book goes on at least one hundred pages too long, and an epilogue that seems out of tune with the rest of the tragic and horrific story detract from an otherwise brilliant book, leaving my final assessment at three and one half stars rounded up for Powers’s ambitious creativity.

[Gavin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Weighty, sloppy, thought-provoking, ill-disciplined, moving, incredibly-researched, boring, electrifying, intelligent fantasy.

This one very nearly became the first book on my abandoned pile a great many times, it is a novel that demands work from you in exchange for the most meagre of rewards for roughly 60% of it's length. When you're writing double-spaced, large-font airport trash that's one thing, but when you've penned a granitic ~500 page tome you've really got to have your pacing and prose locked down tighter than this.

The Stress of Her Regard is a book that attempts to re-contextualise almost everything modern fiction has led us to understand about vampires whilst weaving them into the fabric of our history, the dominant Abrahamic mythology and all the stories that have dogged every human civilization about human-like creatures among us that eat the flesh and drink the blood of our friends and neighbours. A novel that proudly wears it's Literate badge pinned to it's Poetic Canon chest whilst simultaneously trying to tell a linear genre-piece narrative about people attempting to fight vampires with garlic and iron stakes. So; not a book stymied by lack of ambition.

This fascinated and impressed me initially when I heard it, so I'll share it with you: Tim Powers takes documented history of the time and weaves into that a semi-plausible backbone of fantasy to account for why the records are contradictory, or -in this case- why the great poets all seem to suffer from the same ailments and have their thoughts pulled in similar directions (did you know: Byron's physician Polidori is credited with having written the first English vampire story?). He intersperses passages from journals and letters at the beginning of chapters in a way that sometimes grates as only quotidian clever-cleverness can, but occasionally makes the spine tingle from top to tail.

Powers, for all his many laudable qualities (some of which I will laud shortly), is not -unfortunately - someone who could be accused of consistency. I've never known someone do such unstinting, painstaking research before only to get the feel of the time period he clearly knows better than his own utterly wrong. Make no mistake, if you were to give Powers a date he could tell you what Lord Byron ate, how he was disposed towards the world and why. In light of this; why do Byron, Shelley and Keats (and Michael Crawford, our fictional protagonist) talk like academically inclined Americans?
I'm not asking to be subjected to Master and Commander or Pride and Prejudice (in fact I'm asking never to be subjected to either ever again), but people saying "I guess" and "What the hell" in the early 19th century is glaring. Plus later they seem to be aware of DNA and atomic theory (they don't use those names but this is sparse cover for the mistake, especially when the concepts are used as expository wiffle to make tenuous, unnecessary "sense" of his proposed silicate life-forms).

As well as this we're lumbered with an -initially- inert protagonist who is steadfast in his refusal to ask the obvious, sensible questions of people around him who understand what's going on. Then comes the worst of all narrative sins: Excessive description.
This can be forgiven -if not overlooked- in some cases (later in this very novel, for example, my annoyance at being told what he was eating for an entire paragraph barely registered because Crawford had a goal he was pursuing and clear motivations as to why) but following some useless twerp around the continent while he refuses to take control of the situation is bad enough without being assailed by constant descriptions of what the stuff he was doing looked like and how he felt about it. It's enough to know that he shovelled ballast into a boat in order to escape pursuit, telling me that it was a task he quickly took pride in, what the ballast consisted of, how it smelled, that he was worried he wouldn't get paid for his work and how his hands hurt from the shovel are not things that interest normal people.

There are other gaping flaws in the text, as well. Such as how immortal timeless hyper-monsters with seemingly infinite magical powers manage to be just stupid enough to be repeatedly outwitted by humans with iron sticks, the bizarre way he writes out languages in Latin, French and Italian to show that he can then translates them immediately afterwards (either put it in English italics or just be proud of your pretension and refuse to translate for us proles) and why the Nephilim seem to need to drink a fluid consisting mainly of salt-water with some carbon and nitrogen for sustenance when it's explicitly and repeatedly stated that they existed before men and other carbonate life-forms did.

However, once you make it past that 60% breakwater the book comes together with the inevitable satisfaction of a sunset. Plot threads twine together, tabs find slots you hadn't realised were even slots, characters start to break free of the dreamlike ennui in which they wandered and things happen because our motley crew of flawed, real people want them to. There's also a story of genuine love as a force for redemption and hope that's handled with such touching honesty and tenderness that you'd have to have a silicate heart to be unmoved.

It's a terrible shame he didn't start the novel that way.

P.S. As an irrelevant aside, TSoHR was republished in 2008 to cash in on the vampire craze and this very nearly convinced me to give the book five stars and a fake review because the idea of someone reading the Twilight quadrilogy then picking this up because it's also nominally about interspecies romance makes me laugh like a child.

[Res · Rating 2 out of 5]

The one where a hapless doctor accidentally gets himself involved with a race of strange vampirish creatures, which gets him involved with Byron and Shelley.

I liked what this book did with the creatures, combining all different strands of folklore and of science. But I didn't like the book, chiefly because there was no period feel to it at all. It was full of anachronisms: in language ("How the hell much do you expect me to believe?" -- John Keats), in attitudes ("It's a sexual perversion, actually" -- John Keats), and in knowledge (Byron and Crawford are credited with understanding DNA and the structure of atoms, though in fairness, they don't use the words, just the concepts).

So if I'm reading about people who talk like me, think like me, and know the things I know, what's the point of reading a historical novel at all?

[Xabi1990 · Rating 2 out of 5]

4/10.
Si ya me gustó poco "Las puertas de Anubis", de la misma serie, de este mejor hablar poco.
A mi me aburrió la constante referencia a esos poetas ingleses que les emocionan a los literatos anglófilos (Los Shelley, Byron, Keats y demás).
Vamos, que para amantes de estos poetas. Al resto no creo que les emocione la novela.

[Nicky · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’ve always heard amazing things about Tim Powers’ work, but I’ve tried The Stress of Her Regard before, and didn’t really get on with it. I didn’t do much better this time, although I persisted and read the whole thing. I feel like if I knew the life stories of Byron, Shelley, Polidori and Keats, I’d understand exactly what was going on better. It spends so much time on those characters, who from my point of view act erratically and often unpleasantly. (Dead child marionette. I won’t say more, just. Yeah.)

For the most part, it feels more horror than fantasy, albeit a very literary sort; that creeping disquiet, at times replaced by utter grotesqueness, and yet sometimes also laced with pity. It’s essentially about addiction, in a way, which makes it frustrating — the characters are always backsliding, always feeling that once more won’t hurt. Of course, it does.

Most of the characters are pretty unpleasant, too. There’s not much to just like about them — and the female characters are mostly hysterical, ineffectual, or killed.

I’d chalk it up to just not “getting it”, but actually, I don’t see what people like about it at all. I’m glad I’ve read it; now it’s out of the way!

Originally posted here.

[[Name Redacted] · Rating 5 out of 5]

Of lamias and muses, gorgons and graeae, vampires and leanhaun side, Romantics and religion. Rich. Satisfying. Exquisite.

And now, over 20 years later, he has published a sequel!

[Punk · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantasy. This is a vampire story that includes all the classic vampire myths (Likes: blood, having people under thrall, invitations, their native soil; Dislikes: garlic, sunlight, running water, mirrors, wood), but with a twist. Powers blends vampires with succubi, trolls, the Muses, and Frankenstein's monster, and comes up with a unique creature that feeds off men while allowing them almost eternal life and a flair for poetry. Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelly, Mary Shelley, and John Keats are all intimately involved in this story, and Powers uses epigraphs from their work that only make the tale he's telling seem more real.

This book is similar to Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Both involve worlds where magic has been laid over the top of an otherwise familiar history, in this case that of the Romantic poets. Though without the charming narrative voice of Jonathan Strange, Powers' book has more action and suspense, a sturdy but marvelous approach to metaphorical language, and about the same amount of Europe. It also came first. If you know anything about the Romantics, you'll enjoy the way their real lives slot into the fantasy, but even if you're only familiar with their names, Powers does a good job of humanizing them (where applicable) and making them feel like original characters in their own right. Actually, he kind of turns them into action heroes, which is pretty hilarious, what with Keats' consumption and Byron's club foot.

Five stars. It's out of print and hard to find, but very much worth the effort. I'll read it again, as soon as I can get myself a copy.

[Oscar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Los argumentos de Tim Powers siempre son sorprendentes. Alrededor de hechos históricos, empieza a tejar su particular tela de araña ficticia, arrastrando a su protagonista, generalmente perdiendo miembros por el camino, e incluso el cuerpo, a un viaje fantástico y terrible.

‘La fuerza de su mirada’ (The Stress of Her Regard, 1989), ambientada a principios del siglo XIX, tiene como protagonista al doctor Michael Crawford, que el día antes de su boda, durante una fiesta con sus amigos, comete un desliz con su anillo de bodas. Como resultado, será perseguido por una criatura ancestral. Si Crawford es el principal personaje ficticio de la novela, la parte histórica está protagonizada por Lord Byron, Percy Shelley y John Keats, que le acompañarán y ayudarán a deshacerse de estos seres mitológicos. Tim Powers introduce aquí un elemento interesante, el que las musas no eran más que vampiros que proporcionaban inspiración e intelecto a cambio de un lazo de sangre.

Quizás ‘La fuerza de su mirada’ sea la obra más ambiciosa de Tim Powers, pero sigo prefiriendo otras novelas suyas, como la genial ‘Las puertas de Anubis’ y ‘En costas extrañas’. En ellas, Powers no se ve tan encorsetado por los hechos históricos y el modo de cuadrarlo y adecuarlo todo a ellos, y puede desatar completamente su imaginación.

[Sandi · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took a long time to get through this book. I downloaded it as an ebook from a really good independent because it wasn't available for my Nook from Barnes & Noble. The formatting of the ebook made it really hard to read and the material, like most of Tim Powers work, is very dense.

That said, The Stress of Her Regard was very enjoyable, especially for anyone who loves English Romantic literature. Some of the main characters include Lord Byron, John Keats, and Percy & Mary Shelley. I did move the book from my fantasy shelf to my horror shelf because it seemed to be the more appropriate place for it since it dealt with monsters that are kind of a cross between vampires and living statues. They're frequently called vampires in the book, but that's only part of what they're like. This book has some great action and really gruesome horror. However, Powers does a good job of inserting some comedic relief at all the right parts.

Now, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that you're really sick of books about vampires. However, these vampires are truly inhuman monsters. They're not even as fluffy as Count Dracula. They definitely don't sparkle.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like reading Tim Powers. But once you read more than one or two of his stories, you realize they're very, very formulaic. And they all share more or less the same flaws to varying degrees. I'm pretty sure there's marriage at the end of every last one of his stories, for instance. And the heroine may or may not I don't know have any lines that aren't shouting for rescue.

This book, while a very imaginative take on the vampire thing, kind of fell flat for me. You can't have Mary Shelley, mother of science fiction, in your book as a key plot character and give her like 5 lines, none with any agency whatsoever. Byron, Percy, Keats, even frigg'n Polidori are all developed as characters, but not the writer of Frankenstein who's just kind of always standing in the background not saying much--even as her children and husband are dying, her point of view isn't ever really shown. To me, that's just a criminal misuse of a character.

For all that, I mean: it's still a Tim Powers book. Awesome fantastical alternate history things happen throughout and its an entertaining read. I just also found it deeply frustrating for all its faults.

[Shadowdenizen · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars.

While certainly not nearly as good as the classic "The Anubis Gate", this was a decent read: it held ny interest throughout, and Tin Powers can definitely tell a story.

But at the same time it was also a somewhat -uncomfortable- read, as the book (IMO) gave off mixed messages in it's depiction of women overall, even though I'm not sure that's the intent.

I think this book WANTS to be just a straightforeward alt-history/fantasy romp, but given the premise, it seems to have turned into a bit if an allegorical commentary, even if it was inadvertent...

I think Tim Powers can do so much better than this....

[Melissa McShane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read 1/15/16: The line of reasoning with myself was thus:
"Tim Powers has a new book coming out on Tuesday."
"I feel like re-reading one of his books."
"I've only read Hide Me Among the Graves once."
"Dummy, that's because it goes best with The Stress of Her Regard, and you really regretted not reading that with it last time."
"I should re-read The Stress of Her Regard."

So I did. (Though Hide Me Among the Graves still isn't grabbing me the second time around.) This was the very first Tim Powers book I ever read, and I disliked it the first time, and I have no idea why. Impressions from this time around: As I wrote below, Polidori is a more sinister figure as a vampire than he is as a person, because as a person he comes off as terribly ineffectual, more to be pitied than scorned. I found myself noticing the romance between Crawford and Josephine more this time; it's subtle, but sweet, and the line about "two spent swimmers" clinging together seems to apply to them as well as to the nephelim. And it occurred to me that this depiction of Byron is possibly the only one in all of fiction that doesn't make me want to just smack him hard upside the head. As to the rest, see my earlier review below. Tim Powers is a genius.

Read 11/26/12: This has everything I look for in a Tim Powers novel: dark, rich magic; an alternate history that fits perfectly with historical fact; and well-paced plotting that slowly reveals the secrets at the heart of the novel. I have trouble thinking of this as a vampire novel (which it is) because although the vampires behave just as tradition dictates, their origins are completely different. That origin story is, I think, what I really love about the book; the idea of their being lifeforms from a pre-human time, with stony forms and a passion for human love, is so completely different from any other vampire story, and I find it compelling. (I'm glad Powers took some of these ideas and ran with them in a different direction in Declare, because the concept has a lot of potential.)

Michael Crawford is like many of Powers's male protagonists--not terribly heroic at first, maybe sort of a wuss, in denial about the world he finds himself in--and as frustrated as this kind of character makes me, I admit it's far more likely than the guy who's dropped into the middle of some weird magical danger and doesn't have any trouble adapting. Josephine, on the other hand, is one of a kind and a masterpiece of characterization. I don't really believe her defection to the vampire's side, near the end, but it's more because the setup feels forced than that she wouldn't make the decision. And it's for her sake that the epilogue is even necessary; her life was such hell for so long that it felt right to see her finally sane and happy.

Of course, what makes this a Tim Powers novel is the cleverness with which he works the real-life poets Byron, Shelley, and Keats into the story. The excerpts from their journals and letters fit so well with the events of the story that it's chilling. Turning John Polidori, who has always seemed to me to be sort of a loser, into a vampire gave him a more interesting story than he actually had--though I still think he's sort of a loser, and that was one of the things that kept me from really liking the sequel, Hide Me Among the Graves. The Stress of Her Regard isn't my favorite Powers book, but it's definitely near the top of the list.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

A secret history involving the romantic poets, children of Lillith(Lillim or Nephelhim), the Hapsburgs, and vampire legends. The way the story is interwoven with the literature of the poets (Keats, Byron, and Shelley) and their hangers on and relatives (especially Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Polidori’s Vampyr) and with their history(and the political strife in Europe) is terrific. Great atmosphere and an air of creepiness and dread through out and the attitude towards the poets by the protagonist Michael Crawford creates some great comic moments. The protagonist is a little more complex than in other early Powers, hinting at the dark night of the soul he essays in Last Call. Despite these many charms this book almost beats Last Call as my favorite Powers but misses it due to being overlong and confusing in moments. The finale is a surreal horror extravaganza with disturbing and disgusting imagery that will definitely linger in my mind.

[Jess · Rating 2 out of 5]

Rereading this in preparation for the new book. Very disappointed in both Powers and myself as a young reader. While I enjoyed the fantastic elements well enough, I found a lot of things very problematic. The book heavily relies on the monstrous female without any examination as to how these tropes are harmful to women. The author and his male characters have nothing but contempt for the women characters. Women are irrational, uncreative, weak, hysterical, prone to mysterious ailments. Even the female coded nephilim are less effective than the males. The protagonist seems to think that women are only worth saving if they are pregnant, preferably with his child.

Finally: Tim Powers, you would not be writing speculative fiction if it weren't for Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, seeing as how she invented the whole genre. Maybe you should show a little respect?

Or maybe you're afraid that she was a better writer at nineteen than you'll be your entire life? Yeah, you should be.

[Simon · Rating 2 out of 5]

There's lots to like in this book. The way in which it interweaves known points in the lives of some of the Romantic poets into its own plot of vampiric possession and uses their own writings to very good effect in the epigraphs to the chapters is all very clever. There are sympathetic and well-drawn (up to a point) characters. The conception of the vampires is original and interesting.

Yet for all these virtues, I did not love this book. It took me a long time (over half of a quite long book) really to get into it. I'm not sure why. Maybe because the story is too sprawling and unfocussed until closer to the end. There were aspects of how the supernatural stuff worked that I never really grasped well. The references to chemical valency and to quantum mechanics seemed extraneous and like an (unsuccessful) attempt by the author to make the story more cosmically real.

[boogenhagen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this one cause it has the most unusual cesarean delivery in the history of fictional medicine ever.

It was a brilliant idea and kept my interest, plus it reinforced that early learned edict that vampires are just plan BAD.

Tho garlics could be an issue really and now I need to go to Venice and test some coin throwing for my own mental comfort, I am sure Mr. Booge will be on board with that.

(However I am taking extra aerosol hairspray and a lighter.)

[Christine · Rating 3 out of 5]

So at times I felt a little angry with this book, mostly because of the Mary Shelley character. However, I love the amount of research that Powers put into it and found myself respecting what he did in terms of two of the characters.

And the vampires had bite.

[Stacia · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Stress of Her Regard by Tim Powers is pretty great. It's really intricate & detailed in many of the parts, and entwines lots of historical fact (lives of Keats, Byron, the Shelleys, etc...) with much religious story/myth/folklore (nephilim, Lamia, the Graeae, vampires, etc...). Thought it was a very neat twist on the very tragic lives of the Shelleys & Byron, using the story to explain many of the tragic & terrible events that happened to them. (I'm glad I read a bio of the Shelleys & Byron a few years ago, so I knew about the historical fact behind this story. Imo, it really helps to already know some of this historical background before reading the book.) At times, the story seemed a little confusing to me, probably because I don't know much, if anything, about nephilim & some of the other powerful creatures that appeared in the story. Definitely recommended if you want a smart, different, detailed horror book.

[William · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite Powers books, and that's saying something, this ranks up there with THE ANUBIS GATES and LAST CALL in the pantheon of greatness.

Again, it's a simple enough idea -- what if the muses of the great Romantic poets were actual supernatural beings, a kind of psychic vampire? From that Powers imagination takes flight and we get Nephilim, Byron, Shelley, Keats and all manner of innocent bystanders pulled under the influence of ancient creatures, Lamia, trying to find a foothold again in the world.

As ever with Powers the language is lyrical, the imagery is staggeringly well conceived and the characters meticulously drawn. There are majestic supernatural set pieces high in the Alps and in the narrow canals and palaces of Venice, musings on the nature of reality, and tying it all together a fractured love story that starts, and ends, in an English pub garden.

It's such a beautifully put together novel. I'm in envy of the man's talent.

[Ian Tregillis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tim Powers.

Lord Byron. Percy Shelley. John Keats.

Muses. Lamiae. Vampires.

Wonderful.

[Víctor Martín-Pozuelo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Me gusta mucho cómo marca Tim Powers los comienzos de las aventuras de sus novelas: al protagonista le pasa algo que le jode la vida hasta el punto de no poder recuperar lo que ya tenía. Solo le queda ir palante. No pierde el curro o le deja la novia, no: viaja al pasado, se echa al mar con un barco pirata o se casa con un vampiro (sin querer). A partir de ahí, nada es como era antes.

Lo que pasa es que no es solo la situación lo que cambia para los personajes: cambia también su cuerpo.

El cuerpo del protagonista.

Cambia. Se modifica. Cronenberg, yo te invoco.

En el caso que nos ocupa, La fuerza de su mirada, Michael Crawford descubre una mañana que su mujer, recién casada con él, ha sido masacrada en el lecho que han compartido y ahora el personal cree, lógicamente, que él es el asesino. En su huida, un disparo (bueno, lo que él cree que es un disparo) le arranca de cuajo un dedo.

No hay vuelta atrás: tu cuerpo ya no es como era y no hay manera de que vuelva a serlo, y desde ahí todo suele ir a peor. Repito: a su mujer la destruyen. Es un personaje que conoces de medio capítulo, pero yo estaba casi SUDANDO cuando pasa. Por su parte, el protagonista sufre disparos, besos con cristales rotos en la boca y, por supuesto, envejecimiento. Powers te dice "mira, voy en serio". A mí esto me flipa, ¿eh? Es lo que, entiendo, tiene que ser una aventura: hay una parte guapa guapa y emocionante, y otra absolutamente terrorífica, un sentimiento de "¿qué mierdas me va a pasar ahora?" que no cesa. Esto ocurre en En costas extrañas o Las puertas de Anubis, también.

Luego están los temas conocidos con los que se vende este libro: el tema de la fantasía histórica, la mezcla entre hechos reales y personajes conocidos (Shelley, Byron, Keats...), la relectura de los mitos de la historia del ser humano (occidental, va) y bueno, eso también está bien.

Pero vamos, a mí es que lo de la transformación de los cuerpos es que me pone la piel de gallina. Si tuviese le daría mis 10, pero aquí el tope es 5 así que 5 estrellitas (NOTA: en el cómputo global y sé que no es muy compartido esto estaría primero En costas extrañas, luego Las puertas de Anubis y luego La fuerza de su mirada).

[Jamie Collins · Rating 4 out of 5]

During the first several chapters I was afraid I wasn’t going to like this. It’s quite well written, but it’s weird and macabre, with more self-mutilation and blood consumption than I generally care to read about. The story grew on me, though, and I really enjoyed the last half of the book, and particularly the final scenes with Lord Byron battling monsters, by proxy, in Venice.

I know little about the Romantic poets, and I found myself hitting Wikipedia to reconcile this fictional version of Byron, Keats and Shelley with their real lives. I’m impressed with the author’s alternate history where the poets received their inspiration, and encompassed their ruin, from creatures they call the nephilim, which are supremely jealous vampire/succubus monsters who take more than they give to the humans they “love”.

My trade paperback edition has a truly tiny typeface, so this book is longer than the page count would imply. It’s perhaps a little too long - some of the traveling and monster-battling sequences were repetitive.

[Miguel Angel Pedrajas · Rating 3 out of 5]

“La fuerza de su mirada” es una novela que derrocha ingenio, imaginación y preparación. Tim Powers combina magistralmente personajes reales como Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley o John Keats, con elementos de fantasía o terror.

Powers demuestra una documentación concienzuda para encajar las biografías y lugares reales en una trama de vampiros, mitología clásica y fantasía que desborda con su magia y organizaciones secretas.

La novela tiene momentos pletóricos, con escenas muy intensas y que quedarán grabadas en tu memoria. Pero el ritmo es bastante irregular, y las tramas y acciones de los personajes principales se vuelven a veces demasiado confusas, pese a que los personajes hacen intentos continuos de explicar lo que quieren hacer.

La aparición de lord Byron ya ocurrió en la novela de más éxito de Powers: Las puertas de Anubis. Y hay elementos comunes en ambas obras que evidencian que estamos ante el mismo autor. La historia alternativa a la oficial que escribe el autor es muy original y elaborada, encajando perfectamente con la trama que mueve al protagonista principal, Michael Crawford. Cirujano caído en desgracia de la noche a la mañana, de repente se verá rodeado de una generación de escritores románticos por los que Powers siente devoción y debilidad.

El personaje principal recuerda a los ya vistos en anteriores novelas del autor. Alguien atrapado en una trama de la que no puede escapar y le va destruyendo física y mentalmente hasta hacerlo evolucionar en un individuo completamente diferente. Si algo me ha gustado especialmente en esta novela es que la debilidad física en la que va cayendo el personaje juega contra él, cada vez más. Por otro lado, su ingenio crece espléndidamente.

Pese a todo, la novela creo que es excesivamente larga y, a ratos, compleja. Los vampiros aparecen, pero no son del todo lo que conocemos por el canon clásico. Aquí hay mezclados suficientes elementos de la mitología clásica que los hace muy peculiares y diferentes. Por otro lado, tiene muchos elementos de magia y organizaciones extrañas suficientemente evocadoras e interesantes, de esas que me gusta especialmente a mí (rollo Unknown Armies: Libro uno: Juega, “Carnivale”…). La novela recorre también muchas localizaciones de Europa, dándoles a muchas de ellas una importancia casi mística para los propósitos de los protagonistas, como el lago Lemán, los Alpes o Venecia, ciudad que aparece en muchas de las novelas de Powers y que parece conocer al dedillo. De hecho, la parte final del libro transcurre allí y es casi mi preferida. Estoy seguro que mi nota habría sido más baja si no hubiera sido por este cierre de la novela y, sobre todo, por su bonito epílogo final.

[John Eich · Rating 2 out of 5]

When I read the plotline, a historical fiction of "The Romantic Poets Fight Vampires", I couldn't resist checking it out. C'mon, who could walk past that? Sadly, I wish I had.

I think the author started with some mysterious lines in their poetry, saw some similarities, and made a fun supernatural explanation for it all. Then, they opened up the poets' biographies and started fitting this new explanation to them. They even added another fictional main character to fill in the gaps. But the act of crafting a whole story out of these small pieces, tying together a full alternate cosmology to the static history just didn't result in a compelling, or consistent story.

The cosmology, or supernatural explanation for this world, was on an agonizingly slow drip throughout the story, with much of the book having characters drop vague, smug hints to each other about what they knew but were keeping to themselves. When it was finally revealed, it didn't make complete sense, and felt awkwardly patched together, like the Frankenstein monster in one of the protagonist's wife's books.

The narrative was an endless, tedious slog through the travel diaries of three men, more like reading a dusty diary than a tale of adventure. This was a story about immortality, poetry, lust, bloodshed and travel - how could that be stale? And yet it was...it was...

Then again, I'll never think of Byron, Shelley, and Keats the same again. Score one for the author?