The Lost
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
A Novel of Dark Discoveries
THE L0ST
It all started when the gypsy fortune-teller looked him in the eye—and ran away, screaming.
Michael was a teacher at a prep school in Cambridge. Barely thirty, he felt immensely old. He was tired of his life, tired of his job, tired of dreary England. And though he didn't know it yet—tired of Sophie and her safe, undemanding love.
So Michael took a sabbatical and went to Romania, hoping to claim the property his grandparents had abandoned after World War II. He found he was a titled lord, and more—the owner of an ancient stronghold in the Transylvanian Alps, Castel Vlaicu.
Thus Michael Feraru became Count Mihai Vlahuta. It was all a lark; or at most, an adventure.
Until the gypsy recognized him—or something about him—in the streets of Bucharest. Until he picked up the doll. And of course, the girl—the unexpected, unexplainable, irresistible dark-eyed girl.
At Castel Vlaicu, Michael was to learn of an evil older than time, an evil that reached back to the very origins of his shattered family—and into his own dark future.
He was to learn the secret of the strigoï. The undead. Not vampires. Something far, far worse. And far more seductive....
The Lost is a novel of dark discoveries, of a man who loses his soul, and more, in the search for his secret destiny. It is story of passion and horror, and of the doomed love that links the two.
The Lost will leave you shaken by your encounter with an ancient darkness.
If it leaves you at all.
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.
