The Stress of Her Regard by Tim Powers

The year is 1816. A young doctor named Michael Crawford is travelling to Bexhill-on-Sea to get married. After a night of drinking at an inn, he puts the wedding ring he’s meant to give to his bride on the finger of a statue he finds in the courtyard, so that he’ll not lose it in the dark. The rest of the night brings some strange occurrences, and in the morning both statue and ring are gone. He finds a replacement ring and marries Julia the following day, but their marital happiness is short lived. Michael wakes up from his wedding night to find his wife murdered so brutally that nothing human could possibly have killed her. As the room was locked, suspicions inevitably turn to him. Michael flees to London, where he’s given shelter by a young medical student by the name of John Keats.

The Stress of her Regard is a historical fantasy novel that once again brings vampires and the Romantic poets together. Other than Keats, we see Percy and Mary Shelley, Byron, Polidori, and all the people who joined them in Switzerland and later in Italy. In this novel, however, it’s not the poets themselves who are vampires. They’re fully human, but they are preyed on by creatures that are not. Actually, in Shelley’s case it’s a little more complicated than that, but I don’t want to give too much away.

What is meant by “vampires” in this novel is something very different from the folklore or popular culture definition of the term. The vampires we see in The Stress of her Regard are also known as the Nephilim, or giants, faeries, lamiae, succubae, Muses, Graces, you name it. Tim Powers develops a complex and rich mythology in this book. He goes back to Hebrew and Greek mythology and incorporates elements from several different traditions. The result is something wholly new – these are vampires like you’ve never seen them before – and it was refreshing to read a Gothic novel that deviates from the established conventions.

The inner mythology of The Stress of Her Regard is almost too complex to work, but Tim Powers does manage to sustain it successfully throughout the whole story. Towards the end some of the characters have to do something to rid humankind of these beings, and the whole thing is so elaborate that for a while I was almost lost. But as things were explained, and as I remembered certain details from earlier in the book, everything fell into place. I really admire Tim Powers for being able to pull that off.

This story’s main protagonist is Michael Crawford, but we do get to see a lot of the Romantic poets, especially Byron. A few weeks ago, when I read The Vampyre by Tom Holland, I said it’d be interesting to see how it compared to this. But the fact is that the books are too different for me to be able to compare them. Both are Gothic novels that reinvent many of the same historical characters, and both work around, or within, the same historical facts. But what each does with these facts is completely unique.

Although I fell in love with the vampire Byron we see in Tom Holland’s novel, the Byron in The Stress of her Regard is actually closer to my mental image of the poet. I wonder if this has to do with the fact that in this novel we only ever get to see him from the outside, which makes him more distant and thus more mysterious. Also, a complaint that isn’t really a complaint: once again Mary Shelley remains mostly in the background. I really can’t say that this is a flaw in the story, but I very much wanted to have seen more of her. Since it seems that I don’t tire of fictional retellings of the lives of the Romantic poets, next time I’ll have to find one from a female perspective.

I really enjoyed The Stress of her Regard. It’s dark, evocative, fast-paced and very original. I look forward to reading more Tim Powers. I think I’ll try The Anubis Gates next, where once again Byron makes an appearance. Or, if I’m in the mood for pirates and zombies, On Stranger Tides (a book that inspired the awesome Monkey Island video games, which is another reason for me want to read it.)

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