Hide Me Among the Graves

By Tim Powers

Find & buy on

In the winter of 1862, Adelaide McKee, a reformed prostitute, knocks on the door of John Crawford, a widowed veterinarian and a man she knew briefly seven years before. Unknown to Crawford that momentary meeting produced a daughter who McKee, until now, presumed was dead. McKee reveals all to Crawford when she learns that their daughter lives, but that her life and soul are in mortal peril from a vampire ghost.

As the parents join forces to try and rescue their daughter, they discover that the diabolical spirit pitted against them is none other than John Polidori, onetime physician to Lord Byron. Moreover, Polidori is also the late uncle to poet Christina Rossetti and her painter brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Crawford and McKee form an uneasy alliance with the Rossettis—along with a ragtag host of other bizarre allies—determined to rid the world of Polidori’s ghost, who seems to be growing ever more powerful, ever more dangerous.

This novel is an ingenious and highly imagined twist on the familiar vampire story, taking all the usual vampire lore and transforming it into something entirely new. Cleverly inserting historical personages – the Rossettis, Polidori, Algernon Swinburne, Charles Trelawny – into a macabre London underground that out-Dickens Dickens, author Powers creates a lushly atmospheric and chilling novel that should be read slowly, savoring every word, and with the lights turned on.