Hide Me Among the Graves by Tim Powers

Excellent news for fans of Tim Powers. His new novel, Hide Me Among the Graves is published by Corvus in September (£14.99). And if you’ve not yet read Powers’ The Stress of Her Regard you are in for a double treat (also out in September from Corvus £8.99).

Hide Me Among the Graves: “London, winter of 1862, Adelaide McKee, a former prostitute, arrives on the doorstep of veterinarian John Crawford, a man she met once seven years earlier. Their brief meeting produced a child who, until now, had been presumed dead. McKee has learned that the girl lives – but that her life and soul are in mortal peril from a vampiric ghost. But this is no ordinary spirit; the bloodthirsty wraith is none other than John Polidori, the onetime physician to the mad, bad, and dangerous Romantic poet Lord Byron. Both McKee and Crawford have mysterious histories with creatures like Polidori, and their child is a prize the malevolent spirit covets dearly.

Polidori is also the late uncle and supernatural muse to the poet Christina Rossetti and her brother, the painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti. When she was just fourteen years old, Christina unwittingly brought Polidori's curse upon her family. But the curse bestowed unexpected blessings as well, inspiring Christina's poetry and Gabriel's paintings. But when Polidori resurrects Dante's dead wife – turning her into a horrifying vampire – and threatens other family members, Christina and Dante agree that they must destroy their monstrous uncle and break the spell, even if it means the end of their creative powers.

Sweeping from the mansions of London's high society to its grimy slums, the elegant salons of the West End to the pre-Roman catacombs beneath St. Paul's Cathedral, Hide Me Among the Graves blends the historical and the supernatural in a dazzling, edge-of-your-seat thrill ride – a modern horror story with a Victorian twist.”

The Stress of Her Regard: “The secret history of the Romantic poets – Lake Geneva, 1816: As Byron and Shelley row on the peaceful waters of Lake Geneva, a sudden squall threatens to capsize them. But this is no natural event - something has risen from the lake itself to attack them.

Kent, 1816: Michael Crawford's wife is brutally murdered on their wedding night as he sleeps peacefully beside her - and a vengeful ghost claims Crawford as her own husband. Crawford's quest to escape his supernatural wife will force him to travel the Continent in the company of the most creative, most doomed poets of his age. Byron, Keats and Shelley all have a part to play in his fate, and the fate of Europe.”