It all begins near the shore of Lake Leman (Lake Geneva) in Switzerland during the summer of 1816 at the Villa Diodati—a famous summer and place in literary history. It is here that poets Lord Byron and Percy Shelly, Percy’s future wife Mary Godwin, Byron’s personal physician, John William Polidori (nicknamed Pollydolly), and Mary's stepsister, Claire Clairmont, among others vacation. Due to continued bad weather, to entertain themselves, they begin inventing and telling ghost and horror stories. From that famous summer would emerge a lasting horror classic: Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) by Mary Shelley (now celebrating its 200th anniversary and never since having been out of print), a somewhat lesser but still important work by Polidori, The Vampyre (1819), and “Fragment of a Novel” by Byron later included in a volume of works entitled Mazeppa: A Poem. As famous as these events are and as often as they have been retold or used in movie and book plots, the exchange of ghost stories is mentioned only once in Sean Eads’ spectacular novel, Lord Byron’s Prophecy (2015). Eads’ focus is a near drowning of Byron that summer and a terrifying vision he has while he is face down in the water of Lake Leman, “a lake of pain and loneliness”: the vision of a “visage” which seems “unholy… from a world where no one blinks… a black void” which Byron, rescued by Shelley from drowning, interprets as the end of the world.
Eads’ depiction of Byron—his struggles with his “club foot” that tarnishes his otherwise outstanding male beauty and is a constant pain to him physically and emotionally, his anguish over his inability to describe in poetry the vision he has [a poem which eventually becomes “Darkness” (July 1816)], his constant physical and intimate attraction to Shelley which get rebuffed, and nightmares of the reoccurring vision—are all engrossing. But the depiction of Byron and the summer in Switzerland are but part of the story of Lord Byron’s Prophecy.
Eads’ novel is multi-layered as there is a second and third focus to the story. It is also the story of English Professor Adam Fane who very well may be beginning to suffer from dementia and it is the story of his son, Gordon—a basketball star at his college, never close to his father, who gets entangled in a violent physical exchange with his best friend, John-Mark.
As Eads ushers readers deeper into the lives of Fane and Gordon (who takes his mother’s maiden name as his last name to allegedly honor her passing), parallels to portions of Byron’s history in the novel develop. Gordon begins to have visions of faces in the darkness like those apparitions seen by the famous poet and a sense of unease, of being watched, hardly ever leaves him. Fane, who suffers from a withered leg, is certain he hears voices on campus attacking him as his sense of inner, personal desperation surges.
Eads bares events in Lord Byron’s Prophecy in a truly riveting, nonlinear fashion vacillating back and forth throughout the novel among the stories of Byron, Fane, and Gordon and different periods of time in the lives of father and son. While doing so he creatively evokes ties among the three persons cleverly using names, references to romantic poetry, and hauntingly analogous events.
Like a subtle spice in a recipe which one cannot identify, there are hints of the supernatural in Lord Byron’s Prophecy, but the novel is not really about ghosts and ghoulies or one of Lord Byron’s more terrifying interjections about his vision which, as it turns out, has those around him begin to question his mental stability as well as an intriguing double meaning. Lord Byron’s Prophecy is about far greater fears than the paranormal— unrequited love, perilous friendship, guilt, closeted sexuality, personal isolation and melancholy, frustration, lingering recollections, suppressed memories, projection, and even misbegotten illicit love. The greatest mystery in the novel may very well involve Adam Fane—the truth of which lies at the heart of Lord Byron’s Prophecy and which Eads is slow to reveal until almost the astonishing end of the novel.
Eads leaves the details of at least two significant incidents in the novel shrouded in some ambiguity, tantalizing the reader and challenging them to visualize for themselves exact particulars. In so doing, along with the creative uniqueness of the story, the exceptionally well-done and often sensuous writing, and a clever last remark at the end of the book readers are more than likely to find themselves preoccupied by thoughts vis-à-vis Lord Byron’s Prophecy well after finishing reading it—a sign of an outstanding piece of fiction not to be missed.
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