In the spirit of November's cold, I recently took a deep dive back into Jonathan Aycliffe's 1996 novel, The Lost. I read it when it came out, and certain images from it have haunted me for a quarter of a century the way traces of a particularly bad nightmare do—and I mean that in the best possible sense.
An Englishman of Romanian descent, Michael Feraru, travels to Bucharest to reclaim some family property lost in the communist takeover of 1947. In the process, he learns that he is a titled hereditary aristocrat with a dark, centuries-long family history, and a vast castle in the Carpathians to which he is the rightful heir.
The novel is set in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Ceaușescu regime, and the cruelty and tragedy of that era mirrors the cruelty, tragedy, and horror of The Lost. The epistolary style owes a structural debt to Stoker's Dracula, but Aycliffe, like Susan Hill, is in line of literary descent to the mantle of M.R. James, and the beautiful writing and storytelling is 100% his own.
The voyages described in the novel notwithstanding, reading The Lost is a voyage in its own right—even as Michael Feraru travels to Castel Vlaicu and the inherited horrors awaiting him there, the reader travels from the relative safety of the protagonist's soul shores to the dark and terrible place where he eventually makes his physical and spiritual home. It's not a vampire novel in the accepted sense of the term, but it expands the theme of the undead in ways that surprised, delighted, and deeply satisfied me.
Aycliffe has flawlessly rendered a country in pain following the depredations, physical and moral, of a despotic dictator. Re-reading it, I was reminded of sitting in the back of a cab in Bucharest, in 2004, with a monolingual American colleague, while a cab driver with bright, cold eyes, speaking French to me, offered to set us up with underage girls for the night, for a fair price. I can still hear the horrible eagerness in his voice and his utter conviction that anything could—and should—be had for the right price.
Likewise for Michael Feraru, even as he lays claim to his birthright, it lays claim to him. Aycliffe, like the best horror writers, makes his geography and morality as much characters in his novels as any of the human ones.
Long out of print, The Lost is now available on Kindle. You could do much, much worse for a classic horror novel as the days grow shorter and shorter and the cold sets in.
