The Stress of Her Regard

Rating:
Summary: Beyond belief
Review: This was the first Tim Powers book I read. His retelling of that enchanted summer that Shelly and Byron stayed in Italy is amazing and moving. The characters are well drawn and the lamia are terrifying. Don't miss this one.

Rating:
Summary: Beyond belief
Review: This was the first Tim Powers book I read. His retelling of that enchanted summer that Shelly and Byron stayed in Italy is amazing and moving. The characters are well drawn and the lamia are terrifying. Don't miss this one.

Rating:
Summary: Tim Powers' complex plot will keep you guessing all the way!
Review: Tim Powers has an incredible ability to write stories around famous people and events in history, wrapping layered plots around clues that are only explained at later points. "The Stress of Her Regard" is one such novel, offering an alternative explanation to the origins of vampires, and introducing a new type of poetic muse to various 19th century poets and a hapless doctor. The protagonist, like some others we meet in Powers' books, is altogether human...sometimes weak and terrified, but rising unexpectedly to the various challenges with which he is presented. And like all of Powers' books, the links made between totally disparate-seeming items (such as the three Fates and the Sphinx of legend) are fascinating. Tim Powers' books are for anyone who enjoys strange, fantastic mysteries and extremely well-written, can't-put-it-down reading...and "The Stress of Her Regard" is one of the best examples. Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: One of Powers' Best
Review: You will either read every Tim Powers novel you can get your hands on or bog down within the first hundred pages of the first one and never pick up another. His novels are always densely plotted and intentionally obtuse at the beginning. You will find yourself scratching your head and wondering just what in the hell is going on in the story, and just why the hell you are wasting your time. Trust me though, if you push through the wall, you will be rewarded with masterful narratives. Like similar writers Neal Stephenson and Iain Banks, Powers manages to pull the threads together, and once he's revealed enough, the action takes off as well.

"Stress" may well be Powers' most ambitious novel from a literary standpoint. The book treats multiple subjects: love, ambition, literary pretension, mental illness, politics, freemasonry (although obliquely)...oh, yeah, and vampires. Lots of the strangest, vilest bloodsuckers you'll ever find in fiction, and they have a taste for poets' blood. I won't attempt to explain how all of this fits together, but it does, and brilliantly.

Some of Powers' early work was only okay, like "Drawing of the Dark," for instance. As he's matured, though, he's really become a master of tight plotting. This ranks up there with his best, including "The Anubis Gates," "Last Call," and "Declare."