From Publishers Weekly
Not since Ken Russell's film Gothic has so enthuasiastic an eye been cast toward the mythopoetic relationship among the Romantic poets and their role in the evolution of our horrific imagination. As the hero of this lively literary thriller, poet and Berkeley graduate student Derek Hill becomes convinced that a mysterious local patron of the arts is actually the long undead Percy Shelley. Poet Lake ( Another Kind of Travel ) builds a wickedly convincing case as Hill investigates the murder of one of his professors and comes into the possession of letters written by Shelley after his supposed death. Hill researches his thesis in biographical data, in poems, in the OED and over cocktails. The familiar image of the Romantics' sensual lives and fascination with the supernatural takes on a shadowy cast as Hill comes to macabre conclusions about Keats's "Lamia," Byron's corpse and Mary Shelley's fictional reanimation of dead tissue. He sees Shelley's desire to control his own legend as a poet's yearning for immortality taken to its egoistical extreme. Even the simple bloodsucking exchange between art and academia becomes evidence of the parallels between vampirism and a career in poetry. Although the final doppelganger theory doesn't quite track, readers will thrill to the plot's literary intrigue and author's elegant skewering of the dark side of the poetic sensibility.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
This literary psychological thriller opens with the murder of a Stanford University professor of English Romantic poetry. Shocked by his mentor's brutal death, Derek Hill, a promising poet with an uncertain future, sets out on a labyrinthine path of discovery. When cryptic manuscripts, possibly written by Percy Bysshe Shelley and alluding to life after death, land in Derek's lap, he finds himself pursued by a bewitchingly beautiful poet and her seductive, enigmatic lover, Julian, whose charm, intellect, and dark ambition appear to control a host of dark forces and the destinies of poets. In dramatic Faustian fashion, Julian tempts Derek with the allure of certain fame in exchange for his soul. Devotees of English literature will delight in this first novel's engaging literary analysis and incisive depiction of ivory tower politics. Recommended for fiction collections.
Sheila Riley, Smithsonian Inst. Libs.Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
