"Dr. Oliver Stanley, middle-aged English academic, is enjoying his peaceful, undemanding and well-paid research into the history of a Hungarian vampire family said to have emigrated to Texas in the nineteenth century. His pleasant idyll in the magnificently-endowed by practically unused Bean Library of the University of Longhorn is broken when he discovers that the famous Texan Bean, White and Cherny families, founding fathers of both the county and the university and, worse still, his own sponsors, are descendants of the Texan vampire. Dr. Stanley's research is further complicated when he starts to translate a hitherto unknown text on diabolism and inadvertently conjures up the beautiful demon, Lilit, who appears to live on in person of the amorous Dr. Amorian, also related to the great Texan dynasty and Supervisor of the Rare Books Section. Warned off his potentially embarrassing research by Emeritus Professor Octavius White, a fundamentalist theologian with the manners and style of a successful rancher, Dr. Stanley is instructed instead to use his academic knowledge of diabolism to build up the idea of the devil in the minds of Texans so that they will realize the importance of returning to 'the old-time religion and the proper fundamentals of a good and wholesome and godly American way of life'".--Jacket flap