You’re going to compare them, and even though your rational mind knows that they are not in competition, one of them is going to lose out. When frightening and tragic events from that long-ago past start to recur in Harrow's present, and when the dark and deadly specter by whom Andrew's been haunted seems to be all too real, Andrew is forced to solve a two-hundred-year-old literary mystery that threatens the lives of his friends and his teachers-and, most terrifyingly, his own.It is never fair to finish up a book you liked a lot/loved (in this case, The Secret History - despite my best intentions of early bed, I stayed up past until midnight to finish it this past rereading time), and turn straight away to a book you haven’t read before that sounds vaguely similar. In his loneliness and isolation, Andrew becomes obsessed with Lord Byron's story and the poet's status not only as a literary genius and infamous seducer but as a student at the very different Harrow of two centuries prior-a place rife with violence, squalor, incurable diseases, and tormented love affairs. Andrew begins to discover uncanny links between himself and the renowned poet. When the school's poet-in-residence, Piers Fawkes, is commissioned to write a play about Byron, one of Harrow's most famous alumni, he casts Andrew in the title role. Either Andrew is losing his mind, or the house legend about his dormitory being haunted is true.

And there is the pale, strange boy who begins to visit him at night. When one of his schoolmates and friends dies mysteriously of a severe pulmonary illness, Andrew is blamed and is soon an outcast, spurned by nearly all his peers.

Seventeen-year-old American Andrew Taylor is enrolled in the esteemed British institution by his father, who hopes that the school's discipline will put some distance between his son and his troubled past in the States.īut trouble-and danger-seem to follow Andrew. The Harrow School is home to privileged adolescents known as much for their distinctive dress and traditions as for their arrogance and schoolboy cruelty. Set in a four-hundred-year-old boys' boarding school in London, a chilling gothic thriller by the author of the critically acclaimed A Good and Happy Child.

The White Devil by Justin Evans