Review: Tim Powers, The Stress of Her Regard
December 9th, 2008
I have several books by fantasy/horror author Tim Powers—On Stranger Tides, Dinner at Deviant’s Palace, and, of course, The Stress of Her Regard—but the only one I’ve ever been able to finish is The Stress of Her Regard. Even though the other novels are substantially shorter and less dense than Stress, and despite the fact that On Stranger Tides has zombie pirates in it, I’ve lost interest in all of those other works before I even made it to page 100. Now, why is that? Is Powers a bad writer? No. Are his ideas lacking in creativity or fascination? No. So…what gives here?
Simply put, I think Tim Powers is one of those rare authors who only has one good book in him—one titanic text that embodies every last scrap of that author’s literary abilities. All books that come before it are merely preludes, prolegomenae, test drives; and all books that come after it are weak, watery things utterly lost in the long black shadow cast by The Book. J. D. Salinger is such an author (Catcher in the Rye was amazing…but, really, has anyone ever bothered to read Franny & Zooey?), as is Truman Capote (he wrote something other than In Cold Blood? Really?). There aren’t many of their kind, especially in the sci-fi/fantasy/weird-fiction genres, where authors often have imaginations capable of generating reams of quality texts. But you certainly cannot dismiss them as One-Hit Wonders—their one “hit,” after all, is so monumentally good that no matter how many other, irrelevant texts they may crank out, nothing will ever diminish the sheer genius of their Book.
The Stress of Her Regard is Tim Powers’ Book…and thanks to the folks at Tachyon Publications, for the first time in over fifteen years the novel is back in print (in a very handsome trade paperback edition).
While Powers’ many other books have either remained in print for years or have been periodically reissued, The Stress of Her Regard has been almost entirely ignored since its brief life as a Berkeley paperback in the early ‘90s. My cherished copy, purchased at the Waldenbooks in the Uniontown Mall in the interregnum between my sophomore and junior years in highschool, has never left my sight in the subsequent years; and the few people I know who have been lucky enough to find their own copies of this book (usually after I badgered them into seeking it out) are just as possessive. Until the blossoming e-commerce market brought used booksellers to Amazon.com and other such sites, it was virtually impossible to find even a beaten-up, broken-spined copy of this book—but even now, a quick Amazon search quickly reveals that most used copies of The Stress of Her Regard start at $17…and that’s not for a special signed or rare edition. That’s just for the mass-market paperback. The special editions, such as the lovely limited edition produced by Charnel House the same year (1989) that the novel was released, generally start at $200.
In many ways, this novel has had the mystique of the “lost classic” for the last fifteen years—a tome jealously hoarded by those who’ve been touched (or tainted) by its tragic magic—and considering the plot of the book itself, and the characters that people it, such a fate has been somewhat apropos. But finally—FINALLY—The Stress of Her Regard is once more available to the reading public…whom I sincerely hope will glut themselves on this printing and insure that this true classic remains in print evermore.
“OK, fine,” you say. “What’s the damned thing about, anyway? What’s so special about it?”
The Stress of Her Regard is a Gothic novel—one of the very few hardcore Gothic works produced in the Twentieth Century—and is generally regarded as one of the most original takes on the concept of vampires and vampirism ever written.
“Oh, jesus,” you sigh. “Yet another ‘Gothic’ novel about vampires? Do they sparkle? Are they ridiculously sexy? Do they spout poetry?”
My gods, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but…yes, they sparkle. Yes, they are savagely sexy creatures. And yes—honest to Nyarlathotep, there’s poetry involved.
But this novel is not only lightyears distant from any of Stephanie Meier’s wangsty teenybopper tripe, it doesn’t even exist in the same galaxy as today’s ridiculous “vampire romance” literature—even though it is, indeed, filled to brimming with Romance. Because, when I say “Romance,” my usage of the term has nothing to do with treacly saccharine sexuality or hand-stapled-to-forehead Gothic stereotypes. When I say “Romance,” I mean the Romantics—as in the Romantic movement in British poetry, that delicious, decadent movement propelled by the likes of Lord Byron, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley.
In fact, Byron, Keats, and Shelley are all major characters in the novel. Though the story is primarily focused on the protagonist, turn-of-the-19th-Century obstetrician Michael Crawford, the plot itself revolves entirely around the lives of these three great poets…and the stony succubi who drain their blood and slaughter their families even as their bites drive their beloveds into whirlwinds of poetic ecstacy.
The “vampires” of the novel are not undead corpses who creep forth by night to plague the living, but rather ancient lamiae—identified with the nephilim, the “giants in the earth” of the Bible—who seem to be made of some sort of sentient, spiritual stone. They manifest as mountains, or as statues, but can also appear as glittering, electrophosphorescent serpents, or as everyday humans. For centuries, these awe-inspiring but life-draining creatures have lived amongst humans, often “marrying” themselves to one person, whom they love exclusively, to the detriment of their lovers’ families or anyone who may come between the lamia and her adored. They have traditionally allied themselves with poets, though, because their presence proves to be a mystical source of inspiration for the poetically-minded.
Michael Crawford is not a poet—he is, in fact, a baby-doctor—who accidentally finds himself wed to a lamia of his own. On the way to his own wedding, Crawford and his groomsmen one night find themselves drunkenly celebrating the forthcoming nuptials at an English country inn built on ancient Roman pavement. At one point, trying to recover a friend driven half-mad by the sight of something unnatural in the storm-wracked dark, Crawford finds himself confronted by a statue in the yard—a statue with an outstretched finger. In his pocket is the expensive wedding ring he’d purchased for his beloved, so to avoid losing it in the dark and the muck, he slips it on the statue’s finger. When he attempts to retrieve the ring later, though, the statue is nowhere to be found, the ring gone with it.
Crawford eventually makes it to his wedding and marries his betrothed…completely unaware that he has inadvertently taken another bride. When he wakes the next morning in bed with the butchered remains of his human wife, the story of Crawford’s subsequent wanderings throughout the Continent, entwined by fate and by “marriage” with the lives of the three great Romantic poets, begins in earnest.
The Stress of Her Regard is at once a retelling of the “secret” lives of the great Romantics and a startling, effective evocation of the classic Gothic novels that the Romantics adored. Its plot is labyrinthine, filled to brimming with subterfuge, dire deeds, and devious evil. It wends its storm-wracked way from the ancient lands of the first Britons to the peaks of the ancient, godlike Alps; from the foetid slums of London, where “neffers,” or nephilim-addicts, attempt to lure lamiae of their own by shaking handfuls of kidney stones, to the politically-charged environs of Prussian-occupied Italy. The novel is liberally drenched in all the elements of the Gothic: spooky castles, tumultuous weather, nefarious conspirators, familial curses, a brooding sense of inescapable doom, and, of course, beautiful, seductive evil. The multilayered plot, which takes place over several decades, is oftimes reminiscent of Matthew Gregory Lewis’ The Monk, and, naturally, the inevitable influence of Frankenstein is quite apparent.
But what’s most fascinating about this novel is its portrayal of Byron, Keats, and Shelley. We meet Keats as a young medical student in London, Byron and Shelley at Lake Leman (shortly after the magical night that eventually gave birth to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein), and again and again throughout their entire lives. The various poets’ tragically short lives are brilliantly reinterpreted in light of the lamia/vampire mythology that Powers has created. Of course, in the hands of a lesser author (such as Anne Rice or Stephanie Meier), the whole “Romantic poets suffering from attacks from vampiric creatures” could easily be sheer tripe…but Powers knows his history, and the lives of the historical characters, very well. Regardless of the fact that the novel is historical fiction, I learned a lot about the characters through this book. In fact, this was the novel that truly got me into the Romantic poets. Once I’d read about their lives—which certainly were haunted, though not by supernatural sparkling serpents made of living stone—I sought out everything I could find about them, and was thrilled to discover that almost everything in this novel did indeed happen…though, of course, not quite as Powers describes.
Powers’ prose itself, however, is this novel’s only weakness—though it’s a weakness completely overshadowed by the monumental imagination of the story itself. I’m one of those folks for whom a perfectly good narrative can be thoroughly wrecked by an author’s bland style. I’ve liked a number of early Dean Koontz novels (Phantoms still remains a favorite), but his prose is…workmanlike, at best—and utterly mechanical at worst. Considering the nature of the story Powers is telling in The Stress of Her Regard, the simple, straightforward writing is a little jarring. One would expect a somewhat more flowery, more Romantic prose apropos for a plot involving the Romantics themselves. However, Powers’ straightforward, no-nonsense prose is the complete antithesis thereof. Though that detracts a tiny bit from my overall pleasure with the book, the story itself is just so damned good that after the first fifty pages I was completely enraptured by the tale and no longer noticed any deficiencies in the prose.
All things considered, this is a terrific book. It is most assuredly the best book in Powers’ entire oeuvre, though by all means check out his other works if you particularly like this one. That I found them a little lacking is irrelevant to anyone but me. But truly, had I produced a book like The Stress of Her Regard, I would’ve never written another word. It’s truly a shame that this novel has been so overlooked—but now that it’s back in print, it may finally get the chance to gather a true cult following. Go ahead and just buy it. Now. Then read the first twenty pages. If you’re not hooked by then, you may be more stone than flesh. (Of course, I’m not sure whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing.)
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