Genre: Paranormal Romantasy, Suspense, Mystery, Horror
LGBTQ+ Category: Gay
Reviewer: Ulysses
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About The Book
Elias Doever, accused of being a warlock by the residents of the Village of Bedfordshire, Massachusetts in 1692, is executed via the “ducking chair” into a well of holy water. A force erupts from his chest, killing him and escaping the well.
Three hundred years later, the force from the well, Beladon, contacts Dorian Leeves, a young man with supernatural abilities, and informs him that he possesses the same powers as Elias Doever. Dorian will accomplish his ascension into powers beyond his belief if he can re-unite the “three bloods” of Elias Doever, himself, and Beladon. However, the body was buried in secret unconsecrated ground.
Dorian’s new love interest, Toby Blessing, creates complications for his quest to find the skeletal remains of Elias Doever for his ascension. Dorian must decide whether to abandon his ascension and power or embrace a life with Toby in the present day.
The Review
The author dedicates this book to Edgar Allan Poe (which he misspells Allen, but hey), so you know it’s going to be creepy. And also romantic, as Poe often was.
The year is 1992, and we have a young man with the romantic name of Dorian Leeves. He is a recent college graduate, and is just moving into a 300-year-old house outside of Bedfordshire, Mass, with his mother, who teaches at the local college. Dorian has decided to pursue a masters in biology, with the vague life-goal of becoming a biology professor someday. This seems to be mostly because he can get a job along with his grad-student position because of his mother’s position.
The complication here is in the book’s prologue, which describes in vivid detail the death of an accused warlock exactly 300 years earlier in the same town – a man named Elias Doever (is it pronounced Dover, or Do-Ever?). It is into Elias Doever’s house that Dorian and his mom have moved. Not a coincidence, but Dorian doesn’t know that yet. Dorien does know that he possesses certain psychic powers inherited (like her big old Mercedes sedan) from his maternal grandmother.
I found Dorian to be rather full of himself, but maybe that’s just the way we were as young gay men in the 1990s. I think possibly that the slight arrogance (cockiness?) we see in Dorian is meant to create an instant contrast with the humility of Tobias Blessing, the boy on whom Dorian develops an instant crush, despite being his teacher through his graduate assistant position. Toby Blessing is a rugby star at Bedfordshire College, and a classic muscular blond jock. For all that, he’s gentle and surprisingly humble, with none of the toxic masculinity one might expect. Unlike Dorian, Toby is much less secure in his gay identity than the worldly ‘out-and-proud’ Dorian. As it happens, he brings out the best in Dorian.
Patrick Field’s narrative intertwines the budding relationship between these two young men with the paranormal historical narrative of the murdered warlock, Elias Doever. Into this the author has inserted a supernatural element that isn’t part of any witch-trial narratives I’ve ever heard of. This might in fact be the Poe connection.
In the end, this is a book about the eternal fight between good and evil, and mankind’s consistent inability to recognize evil when it should be all too obvious. Field has given us an interesting contemporary twist on an American story that inspired such divergent classics as “The Crucible” and “Book, Bell and Candle.”
4 stars.
The Reviewer
Ulysses Grant Dietz grew up in Syracuse, New York, where his Leave It to Beaver life was enlivened by his fascination with vampires, from Bela Lugosi to Barnabas Collins. He studied French at Yale, and was trained to be a museum curator at the University of Delaware. A curator since 1980, Ulysses has never stopped writing fiction for the sheer pleasure of it. He created the character of Desmond Beckwith in 1988 as his personal response to Anne Rice’s landmark novels. Alyson Books released his first novel, Desmond, in 1998. Vampire in Suburbia, the sequel to Desmond, is his second novel.
Ulysses lives in suburban New Jersey with his husband of over 41 years and their two almost-grown children.
By the way, the name Ulysses was not his parents’ idea of a joke: he is a great-great grandson of Ulysses S. Grant, and his mother was the President’s last living great-grandchild. Every year on April 27 he gives a speech at Grant’s Tomb in New York City.
