The Lost
by Jonathan Aycliffe
HarperCollins, 176 pages, hardback, 1996
Aycliffe is better known as Daniel Easterman, who might be regarded as an author of the thinking person's fat airport bestseller. (Neither name is the author's real one.) The Lost is the fifth in the series of shorter novels he has released under the Aycliffe pseudonym. In earlier books – like Naomi's Room, Whispers in the Dark and The Vanishment – he seemed intent on recreating the atmosphere of M.R. James for the 1990s; these were exceptionally spooky ghost stories, and their aficionados generally read them in a single terrified sitting ... which probably ended at three in the morning.
The Lost is a bit different, since it relates less to M.R. James than to Bram Stoker. The style is epistolary, very much as was Stoker's Dracula, although much more readably so. It is revealed to us that none of the characters is quite (or at all) whom the others thinks s/he is.
Young Michael Feraru, a Briton of Romanian descent, believes that, after the anti-Communist revolution in Romania, he can reclaim the property his family abandoned as they fled the country in the wake of WWII. Sure enough, he discovers on going there that he is really Count Mihai Vlahuta and that he owns the remote and vast Castel Vlaicu (Vlaicu Castle). En route to the castle he falls in love with his Romanian lawyer, Liliana Popescu, little realizing that she has not fallen in love with him but just enjoys having sex. When they arrive at the castle they discover it to be tenanted by two people, mother and son, whom they assume to be caretakers, still there after all these years. But the "caretakers" prove likewise to be of Vlahuta stock, and the mother knows the terrible secret of the castle and of the Vlahuta family – that their dead never truly die, but continue to exist as soul-eaters (strigoï) ...
The most fascinating part of this sometimes confused book (there are occult events back in England which go unexplained) is the way in which Aycliffe studies the changing personality of his central character, who evolves from a simple prep-school master to become a quite ruthless Romanian aristocrat. There are many scarinesses but also a sense of pathos as we watch him head towards his spiritual doom. Unusually, this is a book which might have benefited from being a little bit longer: its pared-downness makes it exceptionally readable, but there is a certain lack of the depth of feeling present in the earlier Aycliffe novels. Nevertheless, The Lost is recommended.
—Samhain