Eurydice (Ruhl play) remember their past or speak in human language. Rooms are also not allowed in the Underworld, but Eurydice's father creates one for her out of pieces of string. He gradually re-teaches her human language and her past. While the father is away at work, the Lord of the Underworld enters as a child riding a tricycle and attempts to seduce Eurydice, but fails. Meanwhile, in the land of the living, Orpheus writes a letter to Eurydice, which her father delivers and reads to her. Orpheus also sends her a copy of the "Complete Works of Shakespeare" by attaching it to
The Stress of Her Regard beings as having qualities of vampires, succubi, incubi, Lamia, fairies, and jinn. Not only predators but sometimes benefactors of humans, they are the basis for both the Muses and the Graeae. The novel's title is taken from the poem "Sphinx and Medusa" by Clark Ashton Smith ("...Yet thought must see/That eve of time when man no longer yearns,/Grown deaf before Life's Sphinx, whose lips are barred;/When from the spaces of Eternity,/Silence, a rigorous Medusa, turns/On the lost world the stress of her regard."). The story begins shortly before the wedding of Michael Crawford, a doctor. The night before he marries