The Stress of Her Regard (1989)

This fantasy/sort-of horror (but it's not scary at all) novel employs the likes of Shelley, Lord Byron, and Keats as characters and explains their real-life eccentricities as symptoms of their various involvement with a species here called the Nephilim and which includes what people have termed lamia, vampires, and the like. It's an absolute hoot and I love the way Powers entwines the poets into the story. Think Pride & Prejudice & Zombies before it was cool. (And take that statement with a grain of salt because I fully admit that I've never read P&P&Z). At any rate, if you like this sort of thing, you'll love this. It's very well paced and nicely written, and again, the plot is imaginative and cool. Also, the audio was read by Simon Vance, so you know it's great. ( )

Powers nails it like he always goes, once again building up a world just a splinter away from our own. This time his jumping off point is the lives and poetry of Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and John Keats. Each chapter begins with an epigraph from a poem or letter (sometimes including Swinburne, Milton, Housman, or another) that very strongly hints at the fantastic events that follow. Masterful stuff. ( )

I abandoned this one for some dumb reason back in the day and restarted it. Tim Powers takes his historical fantasy lens to the Romantic poets and comes up with quite the tale about lamia, statuary, and the relevance of atomic bonds to the Riddle of the Sphinx. It's also probably the scariest of his novels - more than once I jumped when someone walked into the room while I was reading. Worth a read (especially now that you can actually find it in bookstores again). ( )

The first of Powers' novels I ever read, and still my favorite. My wife and I brought our scruffy, dog-eared paperback copy along to a convention where he was signing, and the way his face lit up when we sheepishly presented it is something we will never forget. He was delighted to sign a copy that had so obviously been read over and over, versus all the pristine books he'd been signing for people who simply collected them.

I would really like to see this re-released for Kindle, simply for the portability. ( )

One of my favorite Powers books, and that's saying something, this ranks up there with THE ANUBIS GATES and LAST CALL in the pantheon of greatness.

Again, it's a simple enough idea -- what if the muses of the great Romantic poets were actual supernatural beings, a kind of psychic vampire? From that Powers imagination takes flight and we get Nephilim, Byron, Shelley, Keats and all manner of innocent bystanders pulled under the influence of ancient creatures, Lamia, trying to find a foothold again in the world.

As ever with Powers the language is lyrical, the imagery is staggeringly well conceived and the characters meticulously drawn. There are majestic supernatural set pieces high in the Alps and in the narrow canals and palaces of Venice, musings on the nature of reality, and tying it all together a fractured love story that starts, and ends, in an English pub garden.

It's such a beautifully put together novel. I'm in envy of the man's talent. ( )