The White Devil

Christian Coulson reads this horror story with a clarity that helps listeners follow its wild plot complexities. But his energy is deficient to fully involve the listener in the ghostly terrors of Andrew Taylor and his friends. Andrew is sent for a gap year to the Harrow School in northwest London to rehabilitate his college chances. Coulson successfully presents Andrew's American accent, cynicism, and alienation, which cause his isolation from the other sixth-formers, except for a single female student, Persephone Vine. His startling visual similarity to young Lord Byron stirs the ghost of Byron's school days lover, John Harkness, who threatens Andrew's love--and even his life. The listening experience would be more engaging with a swifter pace. M.C.T. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

Starred review from March 14, 2011
Harrow, the elite English boys school, provides the setting for Evans's gripping second novel (after A Good and Happy Child). Andrew Taylor, a 17-year-old American expelled from a Connecticut prep school for heroin use, gets into Harrow thanks to his father's generous gift to the school, one of whose more illustrious alumni is Lord Byron. In a cemetery on nearby Harrow-on-the-Hill, Andrew is horrified to witness the murder of a fellow student and resident of the Lot, a dilapidated dormitory reputed to be haunted, at the hands of a pale skeletal figure in an old-fashioned frock coat. Soon plagued by nightmares, Andrew learns that someone resembling this gaunt figure appeared in a performance of John Webster's Jacobean tragedy, The White Devil, at Harrow in 1803. Meanwhile, cast in the role of Lord Byron in a play written by drunken and bitter housemaster Piers Fawkes, Andrew finds himself adopting Byron's exotic lifestyle amid a love affair, a TB epidemic, and various bizarre elements in this disturbing gothic thriller.