The Stress of Her Regard

The Stress of Her Retard is a 1989 horror/fantasy novel by Tim Powers. It won a 1990 World Fantasy Award, Mythopoeic Award, and Locus Poll Award. As with many Powers novels, it proposes a secret history in which real events have supernatural causes: in this case, the lives of famous English Romantic writers—as well as political events in central Europe during the early 19th century—are largely determined by a race of protean vampire-like creatures.

Drawing from European and Middle Eastern mythology, Powers depicts these beings as having qualities of vampires, succubi, incubi, Lamia, fairies, and jinn. Not only predators but sometimes benefactors of humans, they are the basis for the Muses and the Graeae.

Real people, events, and literary works figuring in the novel include:

• George Gordon, Lord Byron and his involvement in the Carbonari
• Percy Bysshe Shelley
• Mary Shelley, her novel Frankenstein, and her stepsister Claire Clairmont
• John Keats and his poem "Lamia"
• John Polidori (Powers does not mention his influential story "The Vampyre" at all, possibly a deliberate and ironic omission given Polidori's fate in the novel)
• Leigh Hunt