The Palace (The Saint-Germain Cycle)

An ancient vampire born in the Carpathian Mountains journeys to Renaissance Florence in this novel by a Bram Stoker Award winner. In Paris during the reign of Louis XV, Le Comte de Saint-Germain was known as a wealthy, worldly, charismatic aristocrat, envied and desired by many but fully known to none. In fact, he was a vampire, born in the Carpathian Mountains in 2119 BCE, turned in his late thirties, and destined to roam the world forever, watching and participating in the drama of human civilization.   Now, in Renaissance Italy, he will witness the collapse of the artistic and literary life in Florence after the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent, followed by the rise of the fanatical Girolamo Savonarola.   From a World Fantasy Award winner, The Palace is a different kind of vampire novel—rich, atmospheric, and full of the sweep of history.

About the Author

Chelsea Q. Yarbro is the first woman to be named a Living Legend by the International Horror Guild and is one of only two women ever to be named as Grand Master of the World Horror Convention (2003). In 1995, Yarbro was the only novelist guest of the Romanian government for the First World Dracula Congress, sponsored by the Transylvanian Society of Dracula, the Romanian Bureau of Tourism, and the Romanian Ministry of Culture. Yarbro is best known as the creator of the heroic vampire the Count Saint-Germain. With her creation of Saint-Germain, she delved into history and vampiric literature and subverted the standard myth to invent the first vampire who was more honorable, humane, and heroic than most of the humans around him. She fully meshed the vampire with romance and accurately detailed historical fiction, and filtered it through a feminist perspective that made both the giving of sustenance and its taking of equal erotic potency. A professional writer since 1968, Yarbro has worked in a wide variety of genres, from science fiction to Westerns, from young adult adventure to historical horror. A skeptical occultist for forty years, Yarbro has studied everything from alchemy to zoomancy, and in the late 1970s worked occasionally as a professional tarot card reader and palmist at the Magic Cellar in San Francisco.

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