The Stress of Her Regard
The Stress Of Her Regard cover
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| Author | Tim Powers |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Historical fantasy, Horror fiction |
| Publisher | Ace Books(Hardcover edition) |
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Publication date
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September 1989 |
| Media type | Print (hardback & paperback) |
| Pages | 392 pp (Hardcover edition) |
| ISBN | (Hardcover edition) |
| OCLC | 19516702 |
| 813/.54 20 | |
| LC Class | PS3566.O95 S87 1989 |
| Followed by | Hide Me Among the Graves (2012) |
The Stress of Her Regard is a 1989 horror/fantasy novel by Tim Powers. It was nominated for the 1990 World Fantasy and Locus Awards in 1990, and won a Mythopoeic Award. As with a number of Powers' other novels, it proposes a secret history in which real events have supernatural causes: in this case, the lives of famous English Romantic writers—as well as political events in central Europe during the early 19th century—are largely determined by a race of protean vampire-like creatures known as nephilim.
Drawing from European and Middle Eastern mythology, Powers depicts these beings as having qualities of vampires, succubi, incubi, Lamia, fairies, and jinn. Not only predators but sometimes benefactors of humans, they are the basis for both the Muses and the Graeae.
The novel's title is taken from the poem "Sphinx and Medusa" by Clark Ashton Smith ("...Yet thought must see/That eve of time when man no longer yearns,/Grown deaf before Life's Sphinx, whose lips are barred;/When from the spaces of Eternity,/Silence, a rigorous Medusa, turns/On the lost world the stress of her regard.").
The story begins shortly before the wedding of Michael Crawford, a doctor. The night before he marries Julia, he inadvertently places his wedding ring in the hand of a statue in a garden. When he goes to retrieve it, he discovers the statue has mysteriously vanished.
Despite this mysterious event, the wedding proceeds. Julia's disturbed twin sister Josephine serves as the maid of honor. The next morning, Crawford awakes to discover Julia's horribly mutilated corpse next to him in the bed. Knowing he will be suspected of murdering his bride, Crawford flees to London and passes himself off as a medical student. He meets John Keats, who is also studying medicine. One day while visiting the wards they encounter the grief-stricken Josephine, who attempts to shoot Crawford to avenge her sister. A mysterious apparition saves him.
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