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A Tim Powers science fiction novel never fails to titillate and elucidate with the dark and the bizarre, and all with such original, eccentric color and style. This novel-Powers' seventh-is a shining example.
Telling his tale through an English physician named Michael Crawford, Powers takes on the gods of English Romanticism (Byron, Shelley and Keats), their assorted wives, children and friends and their "haunted summer" at the Villa Diodati in Switzerland (out of which came Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein"). Crawford gives us the dark story behind the spirit of Romanticism in its myriad written, painted and musical forms as inspired by the, ah, bite of the Muses. Hardly Greek goddesses, Powers' Muses are actually lamia (female demons) from the family of Nephelim, which, according to arcane Biblical material, were the "giants in the earth," the descendants of Lilith created...
