A fortress in a mountain pass in Romania hides an ancient evil. When a German detachment takes over the keep to serve as a watchtower, a greedy soldier pries loose the protection. Soon they are being picked off one by one. How is a Jewish scholar held prisoner to choose between the SS and the source of the vampire legends?

Part of Wilson's Adversary Cycle, this also provides some backstory to his Repairman Jack books. ( )

This isn't your father's horror story! Even though the author leads you through the story and you think you know whats going to happen there are suprises at every corner. There is even a touch of romance. ( )

The blurb on the cover says, "spellbinding, chilling, bloodcurdling." That pretty well described the first half of the book. What they don't tell you is that the second half of the book is, "ridiculous, stupefying, preposterous." ( )

A curiously enigmatic novel written is such a way that it conceals its true nature until the climax. It is a shame that the cover art to be found on the mass market paperback editions of this novel makes it immediately clear that you're dealing with a horror yarn. My copy is a hardcover with a binding typical of Book Club Associates which gives nothing away at all upon initial inspection. It is prefaced with an acknowledgement to "an obvious debt" owed to HPL, Robert E. Howard and Klarkash-Ton and that's the reason I acquired the book in the first place.

You won't get any plot spoilers from me, so all I'm going to tell you is that the book is based upon events within an ancient fortified keep deep in the Romanian Alps in 1941 upon the arrival of a squad of German soldiers. On the first night, one of the troops is decapitated in mysterious circumstances. Fear and loathing ensues.

This is a fast-paced thriller and I found it a real page turner. The author has done a great job in rationing the reader with respect to explanations of what's going on and why, with the result that the reader is lulled into a succession of premature conclusions that turn out to be Red Herrings. It reads like a thriller from the likes of Alastair Maclean or Jack Higgins, but that's a ruse. The reason for the acknowledgment remains a major puzzle for a long time. A goodly part of the pleasure derivable from this book arises from a realisation that your working solution to the origins of the mystery is wrong - again!

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and it willl certainly be staying on my bookshelves. I'm really rather anal about how my books are classified and stored; this book has ended up in a subsection that I would never have guessed from initial inspection. ( )

Not the greatest of books and quite cliché-ridden, this is the story of what happens when some Nazis awaken an ancient evil and the evil is actually pretty clever.

I found it entertaining, I've probably read it before but still, it kept me wondering what would happen next. A lot of it was quite transparent. It's not quite as horrific as some others but after an initial slow start I got going and found it hard to put down.

I probably won't read it again but I'm not sorry I did. ( )