Genre: Paranormal, Fantasy, Romance
LGBTQ+ Category: Gay
Reviewer: Ulysses
Get It On Amazon
About The Book
In 1983, Griffin Andrew Meade moves to Bartholomew Bay, settling into Antioch, the ancestral mansion of the wealthy Bartholomew family. Unbeknownst to him, he soon discovers it is haunted by the restless spirit of Angelus Bartholomew III, who met a tragic death in 1919 after a fatal fall from the widow’s walk.
Through flashback dreams, Griffin begins to unravel the secret romance between Angelus and Lazarus Benedictine, the lighthouse keeper’s son-a forbidden love story that echoes Griffin’s own budding relationship with Christian Gutmann. But the past refuses to stay buried.
Angelus’s spirit unleashes a series of deadly acts that reveal his malevolent intent to reclaim his lost love: Lazarus, in the afterlife. Griffin is faced with an agonizing choice: assist Angelus in his sinister plot or risk the lives of his family and first love.
The Review
I’m not sure why the author decided to borrow Anne Rice’s onetime pen name, but I guess he’s a fan (as am I).
This is the story of a young man (several young men, in fact), a tragic love story, and a Victorian mansion on the rocky coast of Maine. The year is 1983, and Griffin Meade has just moved to Bartholomew Bay with his parents and his younger brother. He has left his private school for life in a small rural town, because his mother is starting yet another massive restoration project on a house called Antioch, built by the family who essentially founded the town. Empty for nearly half a century, the house intrigues Griffin almost as much as it does his mother. I definitely heard echoes of Collinwood and the theme song from Dark Shadows.
I’m a fan of this set-up—indeed, this same author used a similar narrative device in his earlier novel, The Servant, written under a different name. My own third novel, Cliffhanger, involves two young museum curators and an empty mansion on a cliff overlooking the Hudson River. Gregory Ashe’s entire Last Picks mystery series is about a young man who wants to be a writer, and is set in a Victorian mansion high on a bluff over the ocean (in Oregon). Clearly, it’s a motif that appeals to writers like us.
Back on the Coast of Maine, inspired by the beautiful drawing he finds in his room of a young man, Griffin begins to have strange, vivid dreams. In these dreams, Angelus Bartholomew (III), the boy in the drawing, guides him through his own story from eight decades earlier. What seems at first to be a lovely romantic adventure eventually turns very dark, and Griffin finds himself caught in the middle.
I loved the characters in this book—Griffin and his family at the center of it. I was less comfortable with the author’s relentless tell-everything writing style, especially when in the final chapters the story takes a very unexpected turn toward a finale I couldn’t have foreseen. Griffin is an appealing young man, and the author is good at delineating relationships. The author’s choice about the direction the story takes at the end seemed to me to create a huge narrative burden that felt rushed. The book ends with a too-hasty epilogue that could easily have been fifty pages longer, giving the author a chance to really work out the rather startling complications he decided to impose on his characters’ lives. It is a compelling and surprising tale of love and loss, revenge and redemption.
Four stars.
The Reviewer
Ulysses Grant Dietz grew up in Syracuse, New York, where his Leave It to Beaver life was enlivened by his fascination with vampires, from Bela Lugosi to Barnabas Collins. He studied French at Yale, and was trained to be a museum curator at the University of Delaware. A curator since 1980, Ulysses has never stopped writing fiction for the sheer pleasure of it. He created the character of Desmond Beckwith in 1988 as his personal response to Anne Rice’s landmark novels. Alyson Books released his first novel, Desmond, in 1998. Vampire in Suburbia, the sequel to Desmond, is his second novel.
Ulysses lives in suburban New Jersey with his husband of over 41 years and their two almost-grown children.
By the way, the name Ulysses was not his parents’ idea of a joke: he is a great-great grandson of Ulysses S. Grant, and his mother was the President’s last living great-grandchild. Every year on April 27 he gives a speech at Grant’s Tomb in New York City.