Title: The Living One Author: Lewis Gannett Published by: Random House, 1993 ISBN: 0-679-41080-5 [hardcover, 380 pages]
Torrance Spoor is your normal California teenager -- a handsome high school athlete with strong sexual yearnings and a long-absent father. The invitation to spend some time with his dad -- the Baron Malcolm Spoor -- comes as a surprise. But what awaits Torrance at his father's windswept estate is far worse than he could ever imagine.The Spoors are the ultimate dysfunctional family. Wealthy, shamelessly extravagant, and impossibly attractive, they are also cursed. The curse has been handed down from father to son for seven hundred years, ever since the Crusades, when a bizarre and mystifying event created a recurring pattern of madness and death. As Baron Malscolm Spoor prepares for his demise, he must pass on the family riches -- and its traditions -- to his estranged son.
But Malcolm and Torrance both have secrets they would rather keep to themselves, secrets that are nearly revealed when a shadowy government scientist picks up psychic readings from the Spoor estate and a bohemian teacher becomes personally involved with Torrance. These two begin an investigation into the extraordinary life of Baron Malcolm Spoor, and their findings are truly horrifying.
Updating elements of the epistolary novel popularized in Dracula, Lewis Gannett tells his gothic story through the inventive use of videotape transcripts, diary entries, and historical records. Vivid, scary, mythic, and engrossing, The Living One explores the terrifying dimensions of family guilt, aging, and the murderous tensions between fathers and sons.
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