They can make lesser vampires and the adventurer Edward John Trelawny is a bridge between the species (as he puts it) as a fragment of a Nephilim statue (the Nephilim are physically small statues) is lodged in his neck and growing within him. The vampires are possessively jealous of anyone they class as theirs and will kill any they feel are close to those they have claimed. There is also a distinction made between ghosts and souls. One wears Queen Boudicca and the other John Polidori. There are two primary vampires in this, both of which wear the ghosts of the dead. The vampires are Nephilim – the stone people. The vampirism is very unusual – though Powers does interesting things with standard lore. Worry not, however, for this book is absolutely able to stand alone and I enjoyed it so much that I ordered the earlier book as I devoured this one. What I hadn’t realised was that this is actually a sequel (of sorts), the earlier novel (The Stress of Her Regard) concentrating on Byron, Shelley and Keats. The Review: Having placed this on my wish list, Hide me Amongst the Graves was a birthday present from my better half. Telling a secret history of passion and terror, Tim Powers recasts the tragic lives of the Romantics in a gripping and Gothic feat of imagination.

And where the price of poetic inspiration is blood. But it is the history of a hidden city, where nursery rhymes lead the adventurer through haunted tunnels and inverted spires. This fascinating, clever novel vividly recreates the stews and slums of Victorian London – a city of dreadful delight. Without him, she cannot write, but her relationship with him threatens to shake London itself to the ground. Through these streets walks the poet Christina Rossetti, haunted and tormented by the ghost of her uncle, John Polidori. A city of over three-million souls, of stinking fog and winding streets.

Hide me among the graves