A frightening eco thriller set in NEW YORK
Historical Gothic novel set in VENICE
1st May 2025
Dangerous by Essie Fox, historical gothic novel set in VENICE.
This novel transports the reader to early 19th Century Venice, when the Lagoon City is awash with illicit sexual encounters and ne’er do wells marauding through the city under veils of mist and darkness. The brooding, damp atmosphere is evocatively rendered in the capable hands of this author, offering a rich and textured backdrop, like a dark, velvet carapace enveloping the characters. Any visitor to Venice will have some sense of the ‘otherworldliness’ that permeates the calli, canali and campi of the city and that element is captured so well in this novel.
“Damp permeated all of Venice . Fabrics rotted. Plaster bloated. Stonework crumbled into dust….”
And one of those characters is Lord Byron, exiled in the city, disgraced back home (a failed marriage, mounting
debt and scandalous affairs) – he almost seems to follow in the footsteps of Casanova, seducing women at every turn. But then the bodies of women start to turn up, attacks upon the neck and The Vampyre, published under his name, seems to follow the trajectory of death and destruction all too closely. Could he be acting out his fantasies? But Byron understands that he has to act and forestall more death, and track down whoever is responsible for dragging his name through the mud.
In the Author’s Note at the end, Essie Fox describes how the story blossomed for her after reading about the time Byron spent on Lake Geneva, with the Shelleys and others, where they avidly read ghost stories, entering a twilight world.
In the novel, she has conjured up a version of the poet that is almost larger than life, a man of inordinate charisma and moods, and much of what she has described is on record, but, cleverly, she feeds in some fictional aspects to create a viscerally evocative Gothic tale.
“What could be more atmospheric than the setting of Venice” she muses.
Delightfully, this novel was featured in the Sunday Times 6 April 2025 “Books” Section, where Nick Rennison admires the choice of Byron as a “suitable candidate for the antihero of a gothic mystery” and “What could easily have been a risible premise for a novel becomes, in Fox’s expert hands, the starting point for an atmospheric thriller“. If that isn’t a great accolade, I don’t know what is!
Tina for the TripFiction Team
Join team TripFiction on Social Media:
Twitter (@TripFiction), Facebook (@TripFiction.Literarywanderlust), YouTube (TripFiction #Literarywanderlust), Instagram (@TripFiction) and Pinterest (@TripFiction) and BlueSky(tripfiction.bsky.social) and Threads (@tripfiction)
Please wait...
