Set in the milieu of New York's Gilded Age aristocracy, Vadriel Vail vividly explores excesses and arrogance from the heights of glittering society to the depths of poverty in unimaginably horrific immigrant slums. Romance, secrets, and high stakes action, exceptional women and extraordinary men are swept into a whirlwind of love and forbidden desire.Armand de Guise, dangerous scion of a New York financial empire, is both handsome and loathsome. Wrought with guilt over an egregious encounter, he turns his lust, then love, toward young, brilliant, and ethereally handsome Vadriel Vail, Newport, RI's lavender-eyed golden boy of wealth and privilege. But Vadriel is soon in the arms of Placidia Van Leer, a perfect social match. As Vadriel crucifies himself on duty and doubt, appetite and anxiety, Armand looms, menacing and melodramatic. Placidia, her prized Vadriel in her bed, grows terrified that someone, something else will steal him away. Can redemption and true love become one?With hyperbolic exuberance, classic in form and relentlessly entertaining, Vadriel Vail is an historical gay romance of the highest order, a stunning follow-up to Gaywyck."Vincent Virga understands that the Gothic is always about the secret, vexed attraction of virtue for vice and vice for virtue, the first unsure of whether it wants to ennoble or be degraded, the second of whether it wants to degrade or be ennobled. That engine pulses through this wild, magnificently excessive novel, which teems with the social and sexual life of queer Gilded-Age New York." - Peter Trachtenberg, The Twilight of Bohemia: Westbeth and the Last Artists in New York"As melodramatic, mysterious and menacing a gay gothic romance as one might desire on the heels of the classic Gaywyck." - Layla McCay, The Queer Bookshelf: a reader's guide"Luminous and beguiling, a profound mosaic of allusion and desire, Virga's novel returns to the literary scene just in time: we need and deserve transformative love - this epic torch that is Vadriel Vail lights the way." - Tom Cardamone, Momentary Aberrations
