Personal Darkness

Tanith Lee

Book 2 of Blood Opera

Language: English

Publisher: Dell

Published: Jan 1, 1993

Description:

Stiff and ancient, their faces blackened, skin pale but unburned, they move across the heaths and hills until they come to the pink-tinged outskirts of the city, where windows glow like Polaroid and the innocent mingle with the damned.

There they will make a new home, a beautiful home to replace the one that lies in ashes. Puccini will play, the chessboard will come out, and the seductions and the feasts will begin...

But for motorcycle riding Uncle Camillo, Malach the warrior, for glamorous Althese, and pale-eyed, half-mortal Rachaela, the history of the Scarabae has reached a turning point. One of their own--little, beautiful Ruth--is igniting a blaze of blood and chaos through the streets of London so that now, among the deathless ones, a life must be sacrificed, another begun...

Emerging from the burned remains of their old home, the ancient, elegant Scarabae ready themselves for a new life of seduction and feasting, until little Ruth ignites a blaze of chaos through the streets of London that threatens them all.

**

From Publishers Weekly

As World Fantasy Award-winning author Lee ( Dark Dance ) imagines Scarabae, they are men and women of elegance and dark mystery, seductive creatures of few words and many secrets. Among them and yet set apart are Rachaela and her daughter Ruth, each unsure of her place in this lost tribe. Ruth's inner torment has exploded in violence against strangers and, shockingly, against her own kind. Their story, set in modern London, unfolds slowly, with grace and freshness, as Lee avoids cliches and weaves her own vision of the life and, perhaps most intriguing, the morality of the Scarabae. Fabulous scenes of death and destruction mingle with moments of astonishing sensuality. Images leap off the page by virtue of the author's evocative descriptions, though in spots she seems to take a false step, with writing that fails to evoke the desired image ("wolf brown day"). One is left wanting to know much more about this strange, complicated and compelling clan. But this is only the second book in Lee's Blood Opera Sequence, and she presumably will build from here.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. 

The House is destroyed, the Scarabae dead or scattered. And the youngest and most dangerous of them, voracious for destruction, is free.
As Ruth, a mind as old as evil in the body of a teenage girl, unleashes blood and fire across southern England, the other survivors regroup their formidable resources. Scarabae wealth and power can replicate The House and even withstand the sun, while help is summoned from others of their kind.
But when Malach and Althene arrive, ageless and exotic, nothing transpires as Rachaela had supposed. For she and Ruth, the demon bred on her by Adamus - father and lover, now dead - are also Scarabae, and Scarabae cleave to their own. Rachaela, irresistibly drawn to Althene's mysterious web, must accept that her daughter belongs to dark, tormented Malach, and find new reasons for hope ...
Yet it is Camillo - malign, geriatric biker with the strength and soul of a child - and the women unwittingly entangled in his mischief, who will finally dispose Ruth's fate, and play the wild card in the Scarabae's endless game.
Subtly blending the human menaces of London's contemporary underworld with a dark vampiric seduction, PERSONAL DARKNESS enmeshes the reader further in the insidious enchantment of the Scarabae.

Emerging from the burned remains of their old home, the ancient, elegant Scarabae ready themselves for a new life of seduction and feasting, until little Ruth ignites a blaze of chaos through the streets of London that threatens them all. Original.