On a rainswept night alive with lightning and thunder, a doctor staggers, drunken, through the streets, and slips a wedding ring on the finger of a bewitching statue...

On the morning after his wedding, Dr. Michael Crawford awakens to a bed soaked by carnage... and the impossibly savaged body of his bride. Already marked with guilt for the accidental deaths of his previous wife and his younger brother, Crawford flees England to escape the hangman's noose. His only hope lies with England's greatest, and most notorious, poets - Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and John Keats - who bring Crawford to a terrible understanding of the strange force that damns him as surely as it protects him from harm.

For Crawford has another, secret bride, one who rules the hours of his sleep; it is she whom Keats called la belle dame sans merce, the poet's muse. She is as beautiful as she is evil, an eons-old power that has sparked a hundred myths, and now threatens to ravage the lives of each of her lovers...