Our Lady of Darkness

At the heart of this forgotten Gothic masterpiece stands Mater Tenebrarum, Our Lady of Darkness, the mother of lunacies and the suggestress of suicides. She waits in the shadows for those whose hearts tremble and whose minds rock under conspiracies of tempest from within. Bernard Capes weaves a haunting tale around Gustavus Hilary George, Viscount Murk, a flamboyant dandy of advancing years who wears his vanity like armor, and his austere grand-nephew Edward, whose quiet reserve conceals a soul far more vulnerable to the Lady's insidious advances. The old man scoffs at darkness, but darkness has a long memory. As the nephew succumbs to something far more dangerous than melancholy, the viscount must confront whether his flamboyant cynicism has been courage or merely costume. This is a novel about the seductiveness of despair, the particular cruelty of hereditary darkness, and the terrifying question of whether the things we mock might one day claim us. Capes writes with the poisonous beauty of a Victorian opium dream, each sentence carrying the weight of forbidden knowledge.