Lord Upton, in the twilight of his years, and his ancestral country home play host to his grandson Seabold, one of his friends, and the daughters of one of his tenants. Upton is recording the goings-on in his journal, as terrible memories from the past haunt him. As his senses begin to fail him, we wonder how much is reliable from our narrator. But it is clear that all is not what it seems, especially the relationships between the characters.

While the story is quite gothic, it lacks the compelling storytelling of say a Bronte. I found that the shocking revelations in the tale didn't send chills up my spine so much as cause me to roll my eyes. There's an interesting thing going on with making the narrator a man succumbing to disease and dementia and writing down his observations in diary form, but it doesn't explore this well enough. Too much is lost on the silly Seasbold plot that just when the story starts to get good, (Is Col visiting the Hall out of spite? Or is it another manifestation of Lord Upton's disease?), it ends.

The author handled Victorian language well until it came to describing the scandalous parts, where then it seemed out of place. ("The first time he showed me his penis...") I get a feeling that the author truly appreciates the era, but isn't fluent enough in it to express that time throughout the story.

At little over 150 pages, I felt I could have tackled this story in a day. However, despite my love for Victoria-era tales, I had to push myself through this one. There was little likeable in any of the characters to keep me interested for too long. Lord Upton should be more sympathetic, but being introduced to the secrets of his strange, incestuous family early in the novel put me at a distance from him. And, really, once you introduce incest early in the novel, all the other revelations fizzle out by comparison. A better gothic tale would draw out the suspense. ( )

Once again, I have done a frightful job of choosing an Early Reviewers book for myself.

As in previous cases, I wanted to like this book. Based on the summary that the publisher provided, I should have liked it. After all, an old man’s dying reminisces during the Victorian era, weaving his past together with his grandson’s future, should make for fascinating reading.

But it didn’t. And I think it was somewhat disingenuous of The Permanent Press to focus their summary on the approach of death. That, of course, is a thread throughout, but it quickly becomes subordinated to a tangle of dirty, vagrant, incestuous relationships that reach out of the past, into the present and the future.

Indeed, it would have been far more honest marketing (paradox, anyone?), if less effective, to do away with all the twaddle about the book conjuring up “the lost world of the English countryside” and the narrator becoming the reader’s “friend,” and simply to say:

This book is about DEATH. And SEX. And VICTORIAN REPRESSION. GRR.

Maybe I'm a prude, but I really do not wish to read about incest, pedophilia, and the like. Moreover, I don't think anyone needs to be reading about such things, unless it’s for the sake of prevention. The content was not graphic, thank goodness, the most explicit thing I can remember being a passing reference to a certain male body part. But the fact was that little of it had a point. It didn’t advance the plot. It did not give us any great insight into the world of the characters, except that they were all messed up and that the Victorian era was an age of Evil Repression (ironic, considering that everyone in the book seems to be acting on their desires rather than repressing them). Haven’t we all heard that about a hundred times, to the point that it's now a cliché?

I do not think Rayfiel is a bad writer. Quite the opposite, in fact. There are some lovely passages, such as this one: “Nature is a balm not appreciated by the young.” Also, I like the fact that he can see a certain tragedy in the idea of death being merely a descent into nothingness. But sometimes the scenes are difficult to follow because he ignores dialogue tags. And in the end it’s just a shame that he squandered his talents on such worthless material.

Despite my high expectations going into this book, I could not finish it. For the first third or so I read it intently. Then I started skimming. And then I finally gave up altogether. Not recommended.

Addendum:

When I describe the book and its setting as "Victorian," I may be using the term rather loosely. In reality, Rayfiel never provides dates. Never mind; in the marvelously funny note that accompanied my galley copy, the publishers revealed themselves to be just as confused as me, if not more so:

—“Written in a British Regency style, Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters will spring to mind.”
—“Time Among the Dead joins ranks with other recent Neo Victorian publications—such as Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters—without having to resort to anything paranormal.”

Please ignore the fact that Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters is neo-Regency rather than neo-Victorian, that the Brontës were from the Victorian rather than the Regency era, and that, grammatically speaking, the first sentence does not make sense at all. The note, unlike the book, is definitely a keeper. ( )

This short novel is told in the form of a journal, written by the elderly Earl of Upton in late Victorian England. As he faces his decline, he dredges up long-buried memories of his dysfunctional birth family while trying to guide and connect with his estranged grandson and heir. The only false notes arise when the narrator addresses future readers, a device which doesn't ring true. However, this is a very small percentage of the whole, which I found moving and memorable. ( )

I did enjoy this book, perhaps more than I thought I would. The fact that the Earl is getting older and may be losing his grip on reality is done well, in a first person diary entry, because he could be going mad, experiencing these events for truth, or just getting old.

It lends one to question their reality and perception of things in a way that much modern literature doesn't. I did think that perhaps the decline was a bit rapid and the back story wasn't as fully explored as it could have been. It is a book that if you aren't careful while reading you could miss many innuendos that are quite subtle.

I liked his falling into memories and quite frankly would have liked more of them but I suppose it may have drawn away from the immediate story of his grandson, Sebold.

A fairly quick read I finished in two short sittings. This story lingers in my mind so I may revisit it after it is fully absorbed. ( )

Time among the Dead is an intriguing 158-page novel published by the Permanent Press. It’s among several books that I’ve received from the publisher to review, all of which I’ve enjoyed.

The cover makes me think of old books on my parents’ bookshelves, gold leaf stamped on aging brown leather and those fine old English letters that I learned to draw in art class. All of which is precise and appropriate, given that the book purports to be a sort of memoir written by the Seventh Earl of Upton in the late Victorian age.

The earl’s grandson, Seabold, has come to stay with him, and gives him a book in which to write, presumably to encourage his failing faculties. But perhaps old Earl William’s faculties aren’t quite as decayed as they seem. He writes the first pages reluctantly, pushing the pen just far enough to persuade the grandson to leave. But soon the diary becomes his closest confidante, a place where he can question Seabold’s interest in the local squire’s daughter, where he can confess his own sins, searching through other people’s rooms, and where, in time, he can allow the reader to search through his Victorian memories.

The earl begins to speculate on who his readers might be—creatures of a later age with fanciful machines and delusions of grandeur almost as futile as his own. He reveals the tawdry secrets of his past, finds them paralleled and reshuffled in the present, and expects them to lurk in the future, hidden in corners, unspoken, unresolved. The links of late-Victorian society to our own become as fascinating as the slow revelations of William’s family history. And as the earl’s dark future looms, with failing health and growing sympathy, the reader is drawn to eagerly await the next page, hoping for healing from the earl’s latest fall, and seek meaning in it all just as the earl must surely do.

The ending satisfies and pulls the threads together with gentle aplomb. The man whose words have filled the pages truly lives on in those words. Except, of course, he’s a figment of the author’s imagination, but he does seem very real.

Time among the Dead is a book to savor, reading slowly to allow the old earl’s thoughts the space they need to percolate across time. As the title suggests, the earl is indeed numbered among the dead, but so shall we all be. Meanwhile he calls us to live in our present, not waiting to write our memories in ancient books as he has done, but striving instead to live them and move forward in life. ( )