The Lost [Paperback]

Jonathan Aycliffe (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1997

A preparatory school teacher from Boston travels to Romania to claim his grandparents' land in the Transylvanian Alps and meets an irresistible girl with ties to his family and to demons worse than vampires. Reprint. PW. "

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Jonathan Aycliffe draws on the first part of Bram Stoker's Dracula for the bones of his story--a naive Englishman travels to a remote, forbidding castle in the mountains of Transylvania (postcommunist Romania)--and then fleshes it out with appealing characters and a different (but unabashedly gothic) plot. Aycliffe's writing is simple and fluid, concisely developing the shifting emotions and relationships as the dark underbelly of the story slowly reveals itself. The evil beings in The Lost are not vampires, but strigoï--free-floating shades of an ancient family of lords. They die and yet don't decay. Their appetites are even more unspeakable than bloodsucking. As Gahan Wilson writes in Realms of Fantasy, "If you enjoy this sort of thing at all, you will have a fine, frightening time as Aycliffe hints at and then delivers nasty surprises, ghastly revelations, and increasingly appalling villainies."

From 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.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Harpercollins (Mm) (August 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061054836
• ISBN-13: 978-0061054839
• Product Dimensions: 6.6 x 3.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,464,437 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Oozes Atmosphere, August 14, 2002

By 

Delia M. Stuart (Alexandria, VA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Lost (Hardcover)

I'm not sure what the others here were expecting. Perhaps Anne Rice or some such. I found 'The Lost' to be one of those 'I can't wait to get home from work and finish it' titles. When I did finish the book, laying on the couch at five A.M., I was actually frightened to get up and walk through the empty house, something that rarely happens to me with horror. Aycliffe is a master.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A gem of "literary horror.", March 6, 2000

By 

Thomas M. Sipos (Santa Monica, CA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Lost (Hardcover)

This book belongs to two genres: horror and "literary novel." Those who expect a straight horror novel will be disappointed.

It's a short, neat little book. Its atmospheric prose evokes that of another British "literary ghost story" writer: Robert Aickman.

I visited Transylvania as a child in the 1970s, and seen Bucharest, and Aycliffe describes it well in this book.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very good..., August 6, 2006

By 

Logical Libertine (Sarasota, FL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Lost (Paperback)

This is one of those books that people either really anjoy or truly hate - simply down to style.

This book doesn't take itself too seriously, and the reader shouldn't be expecting "The Exorcist" level of horror - this is gothic through and through. If you enjoyed Dracula or Frankenstien then you could probably appreciate this modern novel that lends much to those classics.

The story is composed of various letters, journal entries and transcripts of tape recordings, making for fairly short "chapters".

Perfect for a cozy winter night...