The Demonologist
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- 4,49 €
Description de l’éditeur
The desperate search for his missing daughter will take a father to hell and back...
Professor David Ullman is among the world's leading authorities on demonic literature. Not that he's a believer. He sees what he teaches as a branch of the imagination and nothing more. So when offered a luxury trip to Venice to consult on a 'phenomenon', he accepts, taking his 11-year-old daughter Tess with him.
Amidst the decadent splendour of the city, David makes his way to the address he's been asked to visit. What he witnesses in the tiny attic room shakes him to the core: a man restrained in a chair, clearly insane. But what David hears the man say is worse. The voice of his father, dead for 30 years, repeating the last words he ever spoke to his son. Words that have left scars - and a mystery - behind.
Terrified, David is determined to leave with Tess as quickly as possible. But he can't shake the feeling that something is following him. And then, before his eyes on the roof of their hotel, Tess disappears. But before she falls into the Grand Canal's waters, she utters a plea: Find me.
At once frightening and deeply moving, Andrew Pyper's page-turning thriller explores the lengths a father will go to find his daughter, and the darkness he is prepared to confront along the way.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A mesmerizing and melancholy narrative voice lends chilling credibility to this exceptional supernatural thriller. Milton scholar David Ullman, who teaches English literature at Columbia, believes that loneliness, each person's going like Adam and Eve "their solitary way," is the real theme of Paradise Lost. Outside of work, the professor has a failed marriage and a beloved 11-year-old daughter, Tess. One day, a "worryingly thin" woman with a generic European accent shows up at his campus office with an unusual offer. The woman, who says she represents a client "who demands discretion above all," will pay Ullman a sum a third larger than his annual salary if he will travel immediately to Venice to observe a "phenomenon" that his expertise on demons qualifies him to assess. Ullman protests that he doesn't believe in demons, but in the end, accompanied by Tess, he goes to Venice, where tragedy ensues. Pyper (Lost Girl) is especially gifted at plausibly anthropomorphizing inanimate objects to creepy effect. A standard rural mailbox is transformed into "a stooped figure, lurching after me, its mouth wide in a scream"; a book becomes "a mouth gasping for air."
