Product Description

A preparatory school teacher from Boston travels to Romania to claim his grandparents' land in the Transylvanian Alps and meets an irresistible girl with ties to his family and to demons worse than vampires. Reprint. PW. "

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1036565 in Books
• Published on: 1997-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Amazon.com Review
Jonathan Aycliffe draws on the first part of Bram Stoker's Dracula for the bones of his story--a naive Englishman travels to a remote, forbidding castle in the mountains of Transylvania (postcommunist Romania)--and then fleshes it out with appealing characters and a different (but unabashedly gothic) plot. Aycliffe's writing is simple and fluid, concisely developing the shifting emotions and relationships as the dark underbelly of the story slowly reveals itself. The evil beings in The Lost are not vampires, but strigoï--free-floating shades of an ancient family of lords. They die and yet don't decay. Their appetites are even more unspeakable than bloodsucking. As Gahan Wilson writes in Realms of Fantasy, "If you enjoy this sort of thing at all, you will have a fine, frightening time as Aycliffe hints at and then delivers nasty surprises, ghastly revelations, and increasingly appalling villainies."

From Publishers Weekly
When the protagonist of this potent gothic horror tale describes its unnerving revelations as "images out of nightmare, shuffled and presented to our gaze like slides on a flickering screen," he could just as easily be referring to the epistolary narrative that Aycliffe (The Matrix) uses to give his literary nightmare the discomfiting feel of reality. Michael Feraru's ill-fated trip to Romania to reclaim Castel Vlaicu, the legend-haunted estate his family abandoned after fleeing to England at the end of WWII, unfolds through linked journal extracts, letters and press clippings that grow increasingly ominous the closer he comes to achieving his objective. On the surface, they relate Michael's painstaking excavation of his family's buried history, which is tainted with hints of vampirism and ghoulish atrocities well known to the locals. At a deeper level, they capture Michael's subtle transformation from naif to nascent monster, as the hereditary curse he unwittingly reactivates perverts his ambition to turn the castle into an orphanage and insidiously works its effect through him on loved ones back home. Aycliffe channels with finesse the undercurrent of terrible fear that runs through the novel, orchestrating Michael's investigations into the forbidden past and his travels through the bleak Romanian wilderness into a single irreversible descent into the heart of darkness.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
In his hardcover debut, pseudonymous Cambridge professor Aycliffe (Night of the Apocalypse, 1995, etc., as Daniel Easterman) handily upgrades the vampire novel through fine writing and realism. While echoing the diaries and letters of Stoker's original, Aycliffe shores up fantasy with detail built richly from daily life. He begins with a tremendously attractive sense of humor and appealing characters--though humor fades as the creepy crawlies take over. A prep-school teacher in Cambridge, Michael Feraru, inherits Castle Vliacu, his family's fortress in the Transylvanian Alps and hopes to turn it into an orphanage for Romanian children. Delightful letters pass between Michael and his love, Sophie Wandless, back in Cambridge, as he describes his travels through Eastern Europe, his frustrating encounters with bureaucrats, and the gloomy life in today's Bucharest. Meanwhile, he hires a research assistant, Liliana, to help him establish his bona fides as the owner of Castle Vliacu. Materialistic Liliana and her secret boyfriend, however, hope to lead him into opening not an orphanage but rather a hotel at the castle, a business likely to reap great financial rewards. A grinding winter journey to the castle takes Michael and Liliana through villages where many peasants seem never to have seen a car. When their own breaks down, the two nearly die of exposure while plowing about a frigid countryside shadowed by wolves. After arriving at the castle on its beetling mountaintop, they find only an elderly blind woman and her son, who haven't left the site in 50 years. A fine library reveals much about the darkness underlying Michael's ancestors--and himself. At the time, sex blooms between Michael and Liliana, whisperings abound in empty rooms, and a ghost roams the corridors. Pale white wolves that are not wolves but strigoi, or the undead, pace the hills. And what will Michael find in the locked room in the cellar? Brevity breeds tight storytelling, with a final muted twist that proves just enough. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

Very good...
This is one of those books that people either really anjoy or truly hate - simply down to style.

This book doesn't take itself too seriously, and the reader shouldn't be expecting "The Exorcist" level of horror - this is gothic through and through. If you enjoyed Dracula or Frankenstien then you could probably appreciate this modern novel that lends much to those classics.

The story is composed of various letters, journal entries and transcripts of tape recordings, making for fairly short "chapters".

Perfect for a cozy winter night...

Oozes Atmosphere
I'm not sure what the others here were expecting. Perhaps Anne Rice or some such. I found 'The Lost' to be one of those 'I can't wait to get home from work and finish it' titles. When I did finish the book, laying on the couch at five A.M., I was actually frightened to get up and walk through the empty house, something that rarely happens to me with horror. Aycliffe is a master.

A gem of "literary horror."
This book belongs to two genres: horror and "literary novel." Those who expect a straight horror novel will be disappointed.

It's a short, neat little book. Its atmospheric prose evokes that of another British "literary ghost story" writer: Robert Aickman.

I visited Transylvania as a child in the 1970s, and seen Bucharest, and Aycliffe describes it well in this book.