Set amid the historic halls of England’s Harrow School, The White Devil plumbs the literal depths of a shambling student residence known as the Lot to uncover a dank and sinister mystery linking one of the school’s most illustrious alumni, Lord Byron, to a malevolent resident ghost.

Lord Byron as a Harrow schoolboy by William Finden (ca. 1833-34)

Newscom

Appearances count for everything, when young Andrew Taylor arrives at the school from the States. A long-haired American underachiever with a string of New England boarding school expulsions behind him, he’s been sent there to redeem himself after the overdose of a friend, and to bring up his grades in a last year before college, when Harrow’s only girl student, the cheeky and beautiful Persephone Vine, quickly recognizes the newcomer’s striking resemblance to portraits of the famously handsome and flamboyant poet of some two centuries ago, and passes along her observation to the professor Piers Fawkes.

The daughter of a senior faculty member, Persephone is exercising her prerogative to study at the school for her A-levels, and Fawkes is a once-highly respected poet in alcoholic and disheveled decline. Years earlier Fawkes was invited by the school to write a play about Byron which he has never been able to complete; but soon after meeting Andrew, he’s off the bottle and writing again, happy for the availability of the American (in spite of his accent) to take the lead role in his soon-to-be-finished work.

High up under the steep gables of the Lot, Andrew has begun making friends among his fellow Sixth Formers, and on his first visit to the basement shower rooms has barely noted a faint atmospheric shift, when a chance walk through a churchyard brings him in sight of a gaunt frock-coated figure with a sickening cough, crouched over the lifeless body of his favorite new classmate, Theo. Then, as suddenly as the pale-haired man has appeared along the path, he is gone.