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Tom Holland performs a startling feat of oneupbloodship over Anne Rice in his own interview with a vampire: none other than George Gordon, sixth Lord Byron. The expression "Byronic hero" will never be the same.
The trick in this ingenious concoction of a "secret history" for the Romantic poet is the author's culling of a set of actual excerpts from poems, letters, and other biographical documents, all of which obliquely suggest that Byron was trafficking in something more sordid than unseemly love affairs. These real literary fragments become Holland's points of departure for the delightfully appalling narrative, told with literal sangfroid by Byron himself-now some 200 years undead-to a young woman in a London crypt.
Beyond all its neck-biting and shameless grand guignol, the real fun of this well-written novel lies in the rightness of its premise. Lord of the Dead takes the Romantic conceit of poet-as-demonic-force to its logical conclusion. Byron wasn't just demonic; he was a demon. And he wasn't just a demon; he was the demon, the king of vampires, the most seductive and powerful of the race.
A certain debt to Rice's vision must be acknowledged. Byron, too, suffers from a lingering humanity, a malaise wrought from the vampire's insatiable need to drink human blood, which fuses explosively with the erotic pleasure derived therefrom. Like his own tragic heroes, Byron wanders the globe in search of life's meaning. Even immortality has not granted it to him, and his needful desire for blood marks him for eternal misery.
Or does it? Holland creates a brilliant irony here: Byron hopes for an immortality relieved from the physical requirement of killing for blood. Doesn't he know he has it already, through his poems? Blood runs thicker than verses in this book, and pulp fiction delivers poetry a stunning blow. A sign of the times?
Fans of Romantic literature will relish all the name-dropping. Percy and Mary Shelley become central to Byron's vampiric quest, and Dr. Polidori makes a fine villain. (How can a vampire's enemy be a villain? It's easy, when the vampire is Byron).
For its dreamlike urgency and its pungent charnel stench, fans of the undead should not leave this novel unread.
Michael Alec Rose is a music professor at Vanderbilt University.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.