Lord Byron's Prophecy

Lord Byron is troubled. Is his new poem a catharsis of self-loathing at being attracted to other men or an incantation that turns him into an incubus that seeks such sins? Or perhaps something much worse: an apocalyptic prophecy. Present-day Professor Adam Fane is beginning to suffer from what he believes is dementia, which causes him to have the same visions Byron experienced centuries ago. A closeted gay man, Professor Fane interprets these visions to be products of guilt. He's lived for decades with a terrible guilt over the fate of his childhood friend, George, with whom he was in love. His only son, Gordon has grown into more than a passing resemblance of George. Gordon, a star college basketball player, is unaware of his father's past. His heart belongs to a young English professor named Amber, who is a colleague of his father's. As Gordon pursues a relationship with her, he suddenly starts to experience visions similar to those of Byron, as well as a crawling sensation under his skin that makes him fearful of being touched. The interlocking stories of three characters leading parallel lives tells a dark tale of impending personal--and perhaps even global--doom, is written by Sean Eads, a stunning new voice in speculative fiction, whose first novel, The Survivors, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. A finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel!

"A darkly hallucinatory and unsettling fever-dream of a novel, Lord Byron’s Prophecy offers doppelgängers, apocalyptic visions, ominous portents, and eerie hauntings as it recounts a centuries-spanning tale of guilt–and appetite–driven men whose suppressed secrets and illicit desires poison their own lives and those around them. With a kaleidoscopic, continent-crossing narrating technique that leap-frogs between 1816, 1960, 2010, and 2027; Sean Eads (The Survivors) makes a case—a gothic-veined and sporadically operatic one—for what Freud called the return of the repressed." - Brett Josef Grubisic for Lambda Literary

"...readers will be engrossed by Eads’s skillful weaving of the past and present through the troubled psychology of sympathetic, fully human characters." - Publishers Weekly

"The notorious Romantic poet spiritually presides over a modern-day fable of forbidden desire, apocalyptic foreboding, and campus melodrama." - Kirkus Reviews

"Lord Byron’s Prophesy is a tale of layered times that all share the same lurking, dizzying madness. From Byron himself, to current-day Professor Fane, and to Fane’s son Gordon--all of these men are dipping into the same waters of vision and dread, unable to resist their own destructive impulses, despite a serious sense of doom. This is a book of poetry, prophesy, and the dangerous pitfalls of paternity; it leaves a reader hoping for sanity, but suspicious that it’s not in their stars." - L.A. Fields, Lambda Literary Award finalist for My Dear Watson