The Lady of Serpents (Vampyricon)

Hailed as the messiah of the vampyre, Aleric is captured by the sorceress Enora, imprisoned, and forced to battle in the arena for her amusement, and to stop her reign of terror, Aleric must somehow escape, locate the alchemist behind her power, and unleash his old nemesis, Pythia, the Lady of Serpents, who may hold the key to the survival of the vampyres and humankind alike.

From Publishers Weekly

This second installment in Clegg's unfolding Vampyricon epic brims with the same dazzling invention and creative mythography as its predecessor, The Priest of Blood (2005). Aleric, the Breton falconer, returns as heir apparent to the vampire throne, but in a world vastly different since he breached the Veil separating the ordinary world from the world of the vampire myth stream. The "lost century" he finds himself in after years of imprisonment in a silver-sealed well is a cruel, plague-ridden time where he and his un-dead companion, Ewen, are forced to fight gladiatorial battles against human and animal opponents. Old friends and enemies appear in new guises, and unforeseeable plot twists abound. Clegg's rich descriptions, ingenious variations on vampire lore and intriguing speculations on a secret history underlying our own make this an exuberantly imagined dark fantasy. (Sept.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Vampyricon, Clegg's alternate history interweaving nations of vampires and humans, resumes the adventures of medieval peasant-turned-vampire Aleric (see The Priest of Blood, 2005, for backstory). Now in brutal captivity and forced to fight in the sorceress Enora's arena, Aleric must find the alchemist who gave Enora her power. The resulting quest leads him to the ancient home of all vampires and the discovery that the only way to destroy Enora is to unleash the power that ended his own life as a human--the lady Pythia. Well-drawn characters and a reasonably original alternate world boost the page-turning capacity for dark fantasy fans. Frieda MurrayCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author

Douglas Clegg is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of several novels of dark fantasy, horror, and suspense, including The Machinery of Night, The Hour Before Dark, and The Abandoned.

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