Hidden Past

“Of all the times I could ever have used a glass of whiskey.” After the month I have had, this is a big TRUTH.

38.12 Hide Me Among the Graves

The whole time I read this book I felt out of sorts.  Was it because I was trying to process unbelievable things in my personal life?  Because I started it on a plane in a haze of exhaustion and anxiety?  Because I read a few pages here and there before really digging in? Honestly, I still can’t figure it out.  It is well written, with beautifully described atmosphere, but somehow I kept thinking I had missed something early on.  Turns out I did – the first book!  This is a sequel and I had no idea until after I finished it and scanned some other reviews of people saying that you HAD to read the first book first.  Really wish I had known that…

The first book, The Stress of Her Regard, was originally published in 1989 and reprinted in 2008.  Oddly, it is not mentioned on the copy of Hide Me, even though the cover mentions two of his other books and his author bio lists an additional four.  I first heard about this book on NPR and they never mentioned this either, which is odd since our hero is the son of the two main protagonists of the first book.  So, it turns out I had in fact missed something and it effected my reading a lot.  Anyway, back to this book.

So what makes the great poets great? Vampirism of course!

This Victorian London is a bit steampunk and real literary figures play many of the characters. While I concede that this may be a new take on a trend, I have recently seen it done better in Anno Dracula and so the whole thing was felt repetitive.  But the most frustrating part was that the bad guys here are easily vanquished and the good guys make it really hard not to hate them for being so stupid.  The build up to action is done well but the end result fizzles.  Our characters include the real life actions of John Polidori, the Rosetti siblings, and Algernon Swineburne, but the only character I cared for was Edward Trelawney.  I kept hoping the story would focused more on him and how he became what he was – but wait, was that in the first book and so I just missed it?  Don’t know, didn't know it existed until I was done with this one, but I am not bitter.

Maybe you really do need to read the first book to understand all the minute of the second or maybe all of those others factors led to me not connecting to the story. Maybe I just wasn’t in the mood, but for as long as I have been writing reviews and doing this blog I have never had such a hard time figuring out something to say about a book; I couldn’t even come up with a quote.  It isn’t that I didn’t like it, or that I did, I just didn’t engage with it at all which leaves me feeling even more out of sorts than ever.