Lord John and the Succubus

Author: Diana Gabaldon

Genre: Novella, Historical, Mystery

Rating: A

Once again I’m going to start off a review of a Lord John story by referencing the first Lord John story, "Lord John and the HellfireClub."  My critique there was that because of the brevity of the work some of the plot was lost due to all the details that Gabaldon includes in her writing.  This issue is remedied in "Lord John and the Succubus".  Part of this remedy is because of the increased length, while still being a novella it is much longer than "Hellfire Club", but the greater part is because in "Succubus" Gabaldon has learned how to nicely balance the detail and the plot.

"Succubus" picks up much roughly where Lord John and the Private Matter left off: Lord John Grey has gone to Germany (or what would later become Germany) to join the staff of Captain Stephan von Namtzen, Landgrave von Erdberg.  Here men begin to die of a mysterious cause, and rumours of a succubus begin to spread.  Once again, it is left up to Lord John to investigate the matter and figure out just how these men have died and whether or not the succubus is real.  He also must contend with the not-so-subtle advances of the Princess Louisa von Lowenstein, while trying to figure out whether or not Stephan is attracted to him.

The story here is nicely done, Gabaldon weaves the threat of the supernatural with the real deaths together very nicely.  In the earlier parts of the story I really did begin to wonder if the succubus might be real, despite the fact that Gabaldon’s stories are, time travel aside, largely set in the real world.  Gabaldon conveyed the real fears of the men very well, and showed the mixture of firm belief and strong disbelief, as well as many points in between the two.  The language in which much of the story takes place had me a bit confused; it is set in a Germanic part of Europe, thus the majority of the characters should be speaking a dialect of German.  While Gabaldon does make it clear that Grey has some German, and the many upper class characters are all proficient in English, in the first chapter of the book Grey does in fact have some difficulty understanding the language, particularly if spoken rapidly.  Throughout the book there are points when the dialogue is written in German, implying that unless otherwise noted the dialogue is in English.  Grey’s early struggles with understanding some things combined with this note makes me question just how he’s able to interview some of the characters in a language that they logically wouldn’t be able to speak – I really don’t buy that Austrian gypsies in the nineteenth century are fluent in English.  But then, I could really just be reading into this too much and over thinking things.  As such, if this is my biggest flaw with the story then it stands to reason that it’s a pretty good story.