Stephen King
"Want a good English ghost story to read by the fire on a cold winter night? [The White Devil] gathers you in lovingly, then takes you in a strangler’s grip with its escalating horrors."
Gillian Flynn
"The White Devil is an intelligent, bristling ghost story with a stunning sense of place, a uniquely frightful spirit, and a band of absolutely charming heroes—Byronic and otherwise. You’ll dread reaching the end-while flipping the pages furiously."
David Liss
"The White Devil is a page-turning tour de force. Both a thoughtful and learned homage to the ghost story, and a clever and compelling rethinking of the genre, this is an amazing, frightening, and believable novel. I loved it."
Scott Smith
"The White Devil is part ghost story, part murder mystery, part coming-of-age tale, part romance. It’s a delightful cocktail. Justin Evans’ writing is crisp, his storytelling vigorous, his sense of the uncanny pitch perfect. And he’s written a wonderfully creepy book."
New York Times Book Review
"Demonic possession, the provocative topic of Justin Evans’s first novel, A Good and Happy Child, takes on a literary twist and a sexual jolt in The White Devil. . . . Evans heaps an assortment of gothic embellishments onto this coming-of-age narrative."
New York Daily News
"Chilling-to-the-bone. . . . Deliciously frightening, The White Devil is a literary scare story in an earlier tradition before vampires ruled the day, or at least the genre."
The Tuscon Citizen
"[An] ingenious and creepy supernatural thriller, will give you chills even in the summer heat. Evans has fused a literary mystery, sinister ghost story and Gothic romance with the story of a boy’s intellectual and sexual awakening."
Booklist
"[A] crackling literary mystery. . . . Harrow itself contains Shirley Jackson levels of gloomy passages and dark secrets. Smart, scary, sexy, and gorgeously written to boot."
Shelf Awareness
"Evans ratchets up the suspense at an expert pace. . . . The White Devil [is] an authentic page-turner that may well be devoured in one sitting."
Kansas City Star
"[An] ingenious and creepy supernatural thriller, will give you chills even in the summer heat. Evans has fused a literary mystery, sinister ghost story and Gothic romance with the story of a boy’s intellectual and sexual awakening."
Publishers Weekly
Harrow, the elite English boys school, provides the setting for Evans's gripping second novel (after A Good and Happy Child). Andrew Taylor, a 17-year-old American expelled from a Connecticut prep school for heroin use, gets into Harrow thanks to his father's generous gift to the school, one of whose more illustrious alumni is Lord Byron. In a cemetery on nearby Harrow-on-the-Hill, Andrew is horrified to witness the murder of a fellow student and resident of the Lot, a dilapidated dormitory reputed to be haunted, at the hands of a pale skeletal figure in an old-fashioned frock coat. Soon plagued by nightmares, Andrew learns that someone resembling this gaunt figure appeared in a performance of John Webster's Jacobean tragedy, The White Devil, at Harrow in 1803. Meanwhile, cast in the role of Lord Byron in a play written by drunken and bitter housemaster Piers Fawkes, Andrew finds himself adopting Byron's exotic lifestyle amid a love affair, a TB epidemic, and various bizarre elements in this disturbing gothic thriller. (May)
Booklist (starred review)
“[A] crackling literary mystery. . . . Harrow itself contains Shirley Jackson levels of gloomy passages and dark secrets. Smart, scary, sexy, and gorgeously written to boot.”
The Tuscon Citizen
“[An] ingenious and creepy supernatural thriller, will give you chills even in the summer heat. Evans has fused a literary mystery, sinister ghost story and Gothic romance with the story of a boy’s intellectual and sexual awakening.”
Shelf Awareness
“Evans ratchets up the suspense at an expert pace. . . . The White Devil [is] an authentic page-turner that may well be devoured in one sitting.”
Kansas City Star
“[An] ingenious and creepy supernatural thriller, will give you chills even in the summer heat. Evans has fused a literary mystery, sinister ghost story and Gothic romance with the story of a boy’s intellectual and sexual awakening.”
New York Times Book Review
“Demonic possession, the provocative topic of Justin Evans’s first novel, A Good and Happy Child, takes on a literary twist and a sexual jolt in The White Devil. . . . Evans heaps an assortment of gothic embellishments onto this coming-of-age narrative.”
New York Daily News
“Chilling-to-the-bone. . . . Deliciously frightening, The White Devil is a literary scare story in an earlier tradition before vampires ruled the day, or at least the genre.”
Booklist (starred review)
“[A] crackling literary mystery. . . . Harrow itself contains Shirley Jackson levels of gloomy passages and dark secrets. Smart, scary, sexy, and gorgeously written to boot.”
