Brendan Doyle is a twentieth-century English professor who travels back to 1810
London to attend a lecture given by English romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridg
e. This is a London filled with deformed clowns, organised beggar societies, ins
ane homunculi and magic. When he is kidnapped by gypsies and consequently misses
his return trip to 1983, the mild-mannered Doyle is forced to become a street-s
mart con man, escape artist, and swordsman in order to survive in the dark and t
reacherous London underworld.
He defies bullets, black magic, murderous begga
rs, freezing waters, imprisonment in mutant-infested dungeons, poisoning, and ev
en a plunge back to 1684. Coleridge himself and poet Lord Byron make appearances
in the novel, which also features a poor tinkerer who creates genetic monsters
and a werewolf that inhabits others' bodies when his latest becomes too hairy.
