I think I know by now what evil really is

[sovay]

I am evidently not the target audience for Tim Powers' Hide Me Among the Graves (2012), which rushthatspeaks has been reading and describing to me; I think that if one of your central characters is vampire John Polidori, people should always be asking him if he got it from Lord Byron and he should be so tired of having to tell them ("Byron wasn't even a vampire, damn it!") no.

Comments

[movingfinger]

Powers' books are always curate's eggs for me. Parts of The Stress of Her Regard are outstandingly good, a lot of it isn't. I still love The Anubis Gates though, with the circular, literary plot.

[starlady]

I have never liked Powers, whether it was "meh" or just "how far can I throw this object to express the degrees of my hatred."

And yes, Polidori should definitely be tired of having to explain that about Byron, because Byron refused to bang him.

[thistleingrey]

I've liked parts of the Orange County ones, partly because I can see his love for a region that I've always held at arm's length (my best violin teacher lived near a setting that both he and Blaylock have used). I couldn't make headway in Graves, either, and wasn't over-fond of the one before it, though I've read (I think) all of the long-form work that precedes them. Sometimes paths diverge.

ETA Blaylock, less celebrated, writes OC better to my eye.

[kore]

I think I read Hide Me and liked it a lot better than Stress of her Regard, which should have been made for me but really wasn't. Or wait, it's not in my Librarything and the opening's not familiar? Maybe I didn't! ....well, maybe that's one good thing about having a shitty memory, so many things are always new.

[teenybuffalo.livejournal.com]

Hah, I was thinking something like this when I read it, only in my case I thought, "Finally Polidori gets to have a trait in his own right, instead of having that trait in comparison to Byron!" Admittedly that trait is being an undead creeper, but he takes what he can get.

[drwex]

Whether or not Byron was a vampire was already covered in a previous Powers novel, The Stress of Her Regard.

I shan't spoil, in case you or someone else here hasn't read it, but I rate this as one of the top three Powers novels I've read.

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

Ha! I agree.

Both of those books annoyed the hell out of me, mainly because I found their ideas wonderful and everything else really...not wonderful. At all. Especially when compared to Declare, which remains my favourite Powers book thus far.