This grounding in the vividly realised historical detail, from Byron and the Shelley’s stay at Villa Diodati which led to the writing of Frankenstein, to Percy Shelley’s mysterious death, makes the fantastical elements weirdly believable, whilst defamiliarizing the recorded history, making the weirdness and wonderfulness of the past magical and strange again. Powers’ novel takes the turbulent lives of the Romantic poets and uses it as raw material to construct an elaborate Fantasy. Crawford and the poets’ attempts to free themselves from the deadly attentions of the lamiae will see them become involved in a huge conspiracy involving the Graeae and the revolutionary Italian secret society the Carbonari. All the while he is hounded by the creature he married, and Josephine, the sister of his deceased wife, bent on vengeance. Across his journey, he meets John Keats, François Villon, and winds up joining forces with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, all of whom are fellow victims of the lamiae. Following his wedding night to the woman he was supposed to marry he wakes up to find her brutally murdered and must flee to the continent. Michael Crawford is an English physician, who during the night before his wedding leaves his wedding ring on the finger of a statue in the garden of the inn, thus accidentally marrying himself to a lamia. Powers expertly draws on the lives of the Romantic poets and the imagery of their poetry to create a rich gothic masterpiece. Set in the early nineteenth century and featuring Lord Byron, Percy and Mary Shelley, and John Keats as major characters, the novel reimagines the Romantic poets as prey to the lamiae, vampiric silicon-based lifeforms half-woman and half-snake, who have shared the Earth with humans since pre-Biblical times. The Stress Of Her Regard (1989) remains my favourite of his novels. Tim Powers is known for his secret history novels, books that follow recorded history but then find space in the unknown and unrecorded aspects of the pass for the supernatural and the fantastical to encroach. ‘And I wonder how many of them would have freed themselves, if they could have.’”

I wonder how many of the world’s great writers have owed their gift to the … ultimately disastrous attentions of the nephelim.’ His laughter was light and sarcastic.

‘These creatures aren’t especially good visually, but they are purely matches in a powder keg when it comes to language.

The Stress of Her Regard by Tim Powers