The Lost
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- 2,99 €
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- 2,99 €
Publisher Description
British born Michael Feraru, scion of a long line of Romanian aristocrats, leaves his country of birth and his love, to reclaim his heritage - a Draculian castle deep in the heart of Transylvania. He plans to turn his inheritance into an orphanage in the new post-Ceausescu, post-communist country. There he enlists the help of a young local lawyer, Liliana Popescu, to search for the missing Feraru millions, and battle through the complex maze of old bureaucracy in the scam-rich, newly-born state.
Feraru describes his journey into the heart of the Romanian countryside, wasted by years of neglect and caught in a time-warp, as though the twentieth century had never reached it. When he eventually arrives at his inheritance, he finds the castle of the Ferarus, in a sunless valley in the Carpathian Mountains, is home to much more than memories...
Aycliffe conjures a feeling of dread that deepens with each unsettling incident.'
TIME OUT
'Aycliffe has a fine touch.'
INDEPENDENT
'Should ultimately be ranked among the greats.'
INTERZONE
'There are echoes of the great ghost writer of them all, Edgar Allan Poe, in the poised and elegant bookishness of the prose.'
SCOTSMAN
'Sends chills down the spine. Read him and you'll never forget him.'
YORKSHIRE GAZETTE
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.
