An epic tale of love lost and found, plots and counter-plots, politics and magic, The Hideous Head sweeps the reader across the ages from the Egypt of the Ptolemies to Paris and San Francisco yesterday, and at last to that dim, undiscovered country between the boundaries of life and death. It is the story of talking cats and ambivalent angels; of a love that defies time; of an immortal being whose utopian dreams are bought at the expense of countless lives—and the desperate battle waged by a scholar acrobat and a beautiful Parisian socialite against the evil magic emanating from a mysterious text written in a language that predates language itself.

Charged with erotic energy and dark humor, this masterful novel marks the fiction debut of noted historian and author Robert Gaudi. Robert Gaudi is the author of two critically acclaimed works of narrative history: African Kaiser: Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck and the Great War in Africa, 1914-1918, and the War of Jenkins’ Ear: The Forgotten Struggle for North and South America, 1739-1742. His work has appeared in Landscape Architecture Magazine and various scholarly publications. He has taught at the University of Maryland, American University, Goucher College and the University of Iowa. He is distantly related to the great Catalan architect Antonio Gaudi and for this, his first published novel, has opted to use the Catalan version of his name. He lives in Springfield, VA with his cat.