This appeared Sunday:
An American teenager, Andrew Taylor, arrives at an elite British boarding school fresh from a drug scandal at his New England prep. He bears an uncanny resemblance to the poet Byron who attended Harrow in his day. The face earns him the lead in a play being written by an outcast professor. It also brings him the sinister attention of a white-haired specter in a long black frock first seen strangling one of Taylor’s dorm mates in a cemetery. As a small band of believers come to Taylor’s aid , their research reveals “The White Devil” of the title of Justin Evans’s chilling-to-the bone new novel to be a former lover of the rapacious Byron. Other students around Taylor will be felled by the haunt, but ultimately it wants him. Deliciously frightening, “The White Devil” is a literary scare story in an earlier tradition before vampires ruled the day, or at least the genre. (May 10)
