It is Switzerland, in 1816. Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley's wife Mary and Byron's physician Dr Polidori are ensconced in the Villa Diodati beside Lake Geneva. Polidori is a hanger-on whose presence is merely tolerated. Yet he will stop at nothing to outwit them all. He enters a Faustian pact with an elusive penfriend, Annette Legrand, who is the mysterious third member of the infamous Legrand sisters, the notorious vaudeville act.
Annette will produce for him the most compelling vampire tale ever written, which he will read aloud the very night Mary Shelley is to reveal for the first time her tale of Frankenstein. But, in exchange, what can the effete Polidori offer this ghostly female predator, and what is her secret? How real is the insatiable thirst of the sisters for human male fluids? Dream and reality are fantastically blurred for Polidori as he strives to beat the Byron set at their own gothic literary game.
In his first novel, 'The Anatomist', Federico Andahazi showed himself to be a sly master of subverted history. In 'The Merciful Women' he gives a new twist to the vampire novel, while casting an original look on the Romantic period. In this stylish gothic tale, opium and erotica provide the background for another ironic tale of grand themes, sex and literature.
