The Stress of Her Regard Books in Order

The books grouped under The Stress of Her Regard explore a secret history of nineteenth century poetry in which inspiration has teeth. In this cycle a race of ancient, shape shifting beings known as nephilim attach themselves to human lovers and artists, acting as both muses and predators. Powers uses them to thread supernatural horror through the biographies of Byron, Shelley, Keats, and later the Rossetti family.

The first novel, The Stress of Her Regard, opens on the eve of a London physician's wedding. Michael Crawford commits a small, uncanny mistake with his wedding ring and wakes the next morning beside his bride's mutilated body. Fleeing suspicion and terrified by the murderous wife he has unknowingly acquired among the nephilim, Crawford falls in with Percy Shelley and Lord Byron, who are themselves bound to similar creatures. Their flight across Europe turns into a desperate effort to break those bonds before the jealous spirits destroy everyone around them.

Hide Me Among the Graves takes place a generation later and widens the canvas to Victorian London. John Crawford, Michael's son, is a veterinarian haunted by a family curse and by the memory of a night when he and a former prostitute, Adelaide McKee, barely escaped a supernatural attack on a Thames bridge. Years later Adelaide returns with news of a daughter, Johanna, who has drawn the attention of John Polidori's undead spirit and an even older vampiric queen. The Crawfords, McKee, and members of the Rossetti clan are pulled into a long, grim struggle to keep Johanna and the city itself from being swallowed by these powers.

Where more conventional vampire stories focus on infection and romance, these books imagine a parasitic marriage that can grant long life and creative brilliance while systematically ruining ordinary human relationships. Poets court their inhuman partners for the sake of genius and then recoil from the personal cost. Everyday objects, from statues to rings and mirrors, become channels for contact with beings that are as much stone and river as flesh.

For readers, the series offers dense, rewarding historical fantasy full of real letters, dates, and literary gossip repurposed as occult evidence. You can read either novel on its own, but taken together they build a single long arc about family loyalty, artistic ambition, and the possibility of cutting free from very old, very possessive monsters.