The Vampire Gideon's Suicide Hotline and Halfway House for Orphaned Girls
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- 8,99 €
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- 8,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
“Damned impressive!” —Samuel R. Delaney, author of Dhalgren, winner of the Nebula and Hugo Awards
In the house on the hill, there lives a vampire. But not of the sexy, mysterious, or sparkling kind. The vampire Gideon prefers to drink nearly expired blood from the local morgue while watching over the humans around him—humans he calls “children,” because when you’re as old as he is, everyone else does seem like a child. And so many of these children are prepared to throw their lives away over problems that, in Gideon’s view, appear rather trivial.
He sets about trying to fix them by means of an unofficial, do-it-yourself suicide hotline. He's sure that he's making a difference, maybe even righting the mistakes of his past. Then one day a troubled young girl calls, and his (undead) life gets turned upside down. Before he knows it, he’s got a surly, tech-addicted teenage roommate—and, at long last, he begins to grow up.
“Alternately provocative and tender.” —Stephanie Feldman, author of Saturnalia and winner of the Crawford Fantasy Award
“Hugely satisfying.” —Charles de Lint for Fantasy & Science Fiction
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Though the real depth of its characters' mental and emotional suffering remains unexplored, Katz's bleak yet hopeful vampire tale still has a good deal to recommend it most notably vampire Gideon himself, a lost, unexpectedly poetic soul who decides to fill the void of his own pain by attempting to help others. Gideon, long dead and slightly decaying, maintains an unofficial suicide hotline, offering help and insight from the safety of his sub-basement. When Margot, a 16-year-old girl being abused by her brutal foster father, calls in, Gideon rescues her and becomes her guardian in the process. Soon Gideon realizes helping Margot grow up might force him to confront the skeletons in his own coffin. Katz (Descendants) uses the companionship between Gideon and Margot to give the story a firm emotional foundation, but Gideon's narrative arc is advanced largely via the suffering of women, which does a disservice to an otherwise strong story.
