The Anubis Gates (Fantasy Masterworks)

Brendan Doyle is a twentieth-century English professor who travels back to 1810 London to attend a lecture given by English romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge This is a London filled with deformed clowns organised beggar societies insane homunculi and magic When he is kidnapped by gypsies and consequently misses his return trip to 1983 the mild-mannered Doyle is forced to become a street-smart con man escape artist and swordsman in order to survive in the dark and treacherous London underworld He defies bullets black magic murderous beggars freezing waters imprisonment in mutant-infested dungeons poisoning and even a plunge back to 1684 Coleridge himself and poet Lord Byron make appearances in the novel which also features a poor tinkerer who creates genetic monsters and a werewolf that inhabits others bodies when his latest becomes too hairy