<figure class="alignleft is-resized"><figcaption>Tim Powers
Photo by Roberta F. Used under a Creative Commons license and is unmodified from the original.</figcaption></figure>

<figure class="alignleft size-large"><figcaption>John Keats</figcaption></figure>

“He knew that he was about to change his world forever, rob it of all its glamour and adventurous expectancy and what Shelley had once in a poem called the ‘tempestuous loveliness of terror.'” – Tim Powers, The Stress of Her Regard

In this episode we nose around in a loosely gathered suite of ideas arising from Tim Powers’ fantasy/horror/alternate history novel The Stress of Her Regard and one of the Romantic poems that inspired it, “Lamia” by John Keats. Powers’ novel is a strange one, but then so are the poetry and the events that inspired it.

Tim Powers:

“I look for a situation or historical character or place that looks likely to have elements that will make a good book. … And then I read extensively: biographies, journals, ideally contemporary travel guides, things like that, always looking for something that is too cool not to use. … I think ‘what was really going on there?’ I know what the history books say, but why did this guy really do that?” — From “Tim Powers: ‘I don’t have to make anything up,'” The Guardian.

Read more

What is a “lamia”?

Female demon, late 14c., from Latin lamia “witch, sorceress, vampire,” from Greek lamia “female vampire, man-eating monster,” literally “swallower, lecher,” from laimos “throat, gullet” (see larynx). Perhaps cognate with Latin lemures “spirits of the dead” (see lemur) and, like it, borrowed from a non-IE language. Used in early translations of the Bible for screech owls and sea monsters. In Middle English also sometimes, apparently, mermaids — from The Online Etymology Dictionary

Read more, including a definition from 1398: Also kynde erreþ in som beestes wondirliche j-schape, as it fareþ in a beest þat hatte lamia, …

“Lamia” by John Keats

Read it on Project Gutenberg.