A really good ghost story! It was made even more creepy by the fact that Harrow School is a real place (I didn't know that when I started the book). The author clearly loved Harrow School and loves literature. This was a page turner of the best kind! ( )

Definitely had to suspend belief a bit - but the story was interesting and exciting. ( )

A mystery with some extra oomph, with true details from the life of Lord Byron, his year at a tony English boarding school, with some interesting tidbits about tuberculosis and a surprisingly brave and affecting ending. ( )

The White Devil by Justin Evans
3.5★'s

From The Book:
Set in a four-hundred-year-old boys' boarding school in London, a chilling gothic thriller...A fierce and jealous ghost . . .A young man's fight for his life . . .

The Harrow School is home to privileged adolescents known as much for their distinctive dress and traditions as for their arrogance and schoolboy cruelty. Seventeen-year-old American Andrew Taylor is enrolled in the esteemed British institution by his father, who hopes that the school's discipline will put some distance between his son and his troubled past in the States.

But trouble—and danger—seem to follow Andrew. When one of his schoolmates and friends dies mysteriously of a severe pulmonary illness, Andrew is blamed and is soon an outcast, spurned by nearly all his peers. And there is the pale, strange boy who begins to visit him at night. Either Andrew is losing his mind, or the house legend about his dormitory being haunted is true.

When the school's poet-in-residence, Piers Fawkes, is commissioned to write a play about Byron, one of Harrow's most famous alumni, he casts Andrew in the title role. Andrew begins to discover uncanny links between himself and the renowned poet. In his loneliness and isolation, Andrew becomes obsessed with Lord Byron's story and the poet's status not only as a literary genius and infamous seducer but as a student at the very different Harrow of two centuries prior—a place rife with violence, squalor, incurable diseases, and tormented love affairs.

When frightening and tragic events from that long-ago past start to recur in Harrow's present, and when the dark and deadly specter by whom Andrew's been haunted seems to be all too real, Andrew is forced to solve a two-hundred-year-old literary mystery that threatens the lives of his friends and his teachers—and, most terrifyingly, his own.

My Thoughts:

The story was intriguing...even though I didn't think it was exactly "chilling". " The Tsucon Citizen" gives a fairly true account of just what the story is about when it says "Evans has fused a literary mystery, sinister ghost story and Gothic romance with the story of a boy’s intellectual and sexual awakening.”

The author has also made the characters as likable as 14-17 year old boys can be...you can't help be work up some sympathy for the main character...16 year old Andrew Taylor...an American boy sent to this old English school by his domineering and controlling wealthy father without a clue of the differences in cultures and even the language... that you would think would be somewhat the same.... that he will be forced to live with for the next year.

I can recommend this novel but not as a Gothic thriller. If a thriller is what you are expecting you will be disappointed. But for an atmospheric Gothic mystery with well drawn characters...absolutely. ( )

In the tradition of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, The White Devil is a masterful gothic ghost story. Set in a 400-year-old boarding school in London, the story begins with the arrival of the American student Andrew. He is anxious to succeed here after being kicked out of his previous boarding school, but trouble of a different sort seems to be following him. A fellow student dies suddenly of a mysterious illness and Andrew begins to see ghosts and suffer horrible nightmares from which he wakes up screaming. When Andrew is cast in the title role of a new play about one of the school's most famous students, Lord Byron, both he and the play's author begin to suspect that the mysterious events at the school are tied to Andrew's uncanny resemblance to Lord Byron. As they (along with the school's librarian) race to understand why the ghost is appearing now and what he wants, the tension builds to a shattering climax. ( )