"Andrew Taylor, a 17-year-old
American expelled from a Connecticut prep school for heroin use, gets into
Harrow thanks to his father's generous gift to the school, one of whose more
illustrious alumni is Lord Byron. In a cemetery on nearby Harrow-on-the-Hill,
Andrew is horrified to witness the murder of a fellow student and resident of
the Lot, a dilapidated dormitory reputed to be haunted, at the hands of a pale
skeletal figure in an old-fashioned frock coat. Soon plagued by nightmares,
Andrew learns that someone resembling this gaunt figure appeared in a
performance of John Webster's Jacobean tragedy, The White Devil, at Harrow in
1803. Meanwhile, cast in the role of Lord Byron in a play written by drunken
and bitter housemaster Piers Fawkes, Andrew finds himself adopting Byron's
exotic lifestyle amid a love affair, a TB epidemic, and other various bizarre
elements."
The White Devil, the second
novel by Justin Evans, is a wonderfully weird and disturbing Gothic thriller that
often reminded me of late 1960s or early 1970’s British film. Although set in
present day, a lot of the book feels old and from another age. Perhaps the
premise, using Lord Byron, the legendary English poet who was the leading
figure of the Romantic movement, helped age the tale, but the Harrows School,
with its traditional dress code and it’s particular ways of describing the
students, also gave an air of oldness to the story. Then the clichéd dreary,
often damp weather added to the mood immensely,
Evans clearly did some great
research here, which probably makes the whole book interesting because it is
partially based on historical facts. And our two male leads are flawed, but
often given opportunity to grow beyond their pasts. I often thought they were
in love with each other, even though there was an age difference, but more so,
because they never realized it (especially Piers Fawkes, who is arrogant and
unflinching in his rule breaking, but clearly hiding something more than just
that, using booze and cigarettes as a shield). It’s this unpredictability
between the characters that kept me reading, if only because I wanted to see
what they did –Evan’s never telegraphs anything.
I loved Evan’s debut novel,
2007’s A Good and Happy Child and The White Devil offers more thrills and
gothic atmosphere for anyone who needs something to read on a cold, dreary
Saturday afternoon (preferably in October).
On a side note, I can find no
more books written by this author since the 2012 release of The White Devil. It
also turns out that “Justin Evans” is a pretty common name, so even Googling
him did not help. I’m curious what happened to him.
No comments:
Post a Comment