Title: Lenora: The Oupire

Author: Caroline Davis

Genre: Vampire Romance

 

Spending the summer at his Uncle’s house in Graymont, New Hampshire, is the highlight of 1900 for seventeen-year-old Rupert Upton. His cousin, Julia, is there together with a collective of emerging tonalism artists.

Over eighty years later, Rupert, now an Oupire, has bought his Uncle’s summer home intending to quietly reconnect with his painting. But Rupert’s plans are interrupted by Lenora, a captivating young woman, tasked with cataloging folksy Americana artifacts at Chapman Hall, a residence Rupert remembers all too well.

Davis establishes the tone for her engrossing Oupire novel with a brief Prologue set in 1900 during Rupert’s third summer at Graymont. It’s an atmospheric and well-written start with several curious lines of intrigue.

Davis’s prose is poised, precise, and has a nicely old-fashioned feel that continues throughout the novel, even when the perspective pivots from Rupert’s to Lenora’s.

Davis then transports the reader and Rupert back to Graymont village in 1982. She evokes the early eighties convincingly, and although contemporary enough to provide nostalgic relatability to the reader, it lends sufficient distance to Rupert’s previous life for contrast.

The lack of present-day technology also propels areas of the story while enabling the prose and Rupert to maintain their slight archaic gloss.

Lenora is not a straightforward Vampire novel. Davis has packed a lot into the book and, for some while, the fact Rupert is an Oupire is almost secondary to the Graymont landscape, his tonalist painting, and what may have occurred with his cousin, Julia, over eighty years ago.

Davis lays meticulous emphasis on detail, not just the New Hampshire topography but the main characters’ minutiae, mannerisms, and appearance. She brings their emotions alive with movements that reflect their motivations and desires, some of which are unexpected.

Overall, she avoids superfluity. Her writing is so elegant and these finer points are so considered that it’s absorbing to read. The descriptive density adds texture and tension to the narrative, without compromising the relatively steady pace.

Rupert is arrestingly portrayed with an understandable, slightly haunted air of a man out of time and a touch of the Byronic without sinking into stereotype.

Davis’s decision to make him an Oupire, who have subtly differing characteristics from vampires, is astute, giving her more leeway with the plot and gently unsettling reader preconceptions.

Twenty-nine-year-old Lenora is somewhat of an enigma especially given her Slavic heritage and vampiric name. Her great-grandfather’s prophesy adds a neat Gothic nod but seems under-explored. Occasionally, it feels as if the reader is being led toward a sharper twist or reveal concerning Lenora that never quite materializes.

She appears older than her years, yet is breathtakingly naïve in certain situations and can frustrate with her single-minded inquisitiveness. Notwithstanding, her snooping drives the narrative in a number of places and forces a complete plot lurch shortly after two-thirds.

Lenora’s work at Chapman Hall also provides tangents as issues arise between Elliot Chapman, his friend, Charles Langford, and caretaker, Jack O’Hagan. These sinister detours coalesce into a thrilling sub-plot, which feeds back into the main story.

Davis maintains tight focus on the ending, which could have become scrappy, but instead is gripping and neatly concluded. The subsequent epilogue is a touch syrupy and arguably not required.

Nonetheless, romance is at the heart of the book and Davis calibrates it beautifully without gratuity. The interactions between Rupert and Lenora, even from early on, are softly awash with sensuous rhythms and charged with a knowing intimacy.

Davis has written a mesmerizingly good Vampire novel that has the feel of a classic. Intelligently wrought, sophisticated, and suspenseful, Lenora proves difficult to put down.

 

 

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