Publication Date: 2011
Category: Adult fiction
Who'll want to read it? Anyone who loves a story where you don't quite know what is happening , whether the truth is being told, and who is really who.
Point of no return: "I had been mistaken for him so many times that when he died it was as if part of myself had died too." 1st line, page one. Also, the creepy cover photo is pretty intriguing.
Classic line:
What's it all about? Kevin Thunder grew up next door to a former residence of Bram Stoker. An imaginative child, it is no surprise that a vampire shadows Kevin's life. As a young boy he imagines a Count, wrapped in a cloak, living in Stoker's house. He believes the lady residing there is actually a caretaker, bringing in supplies, so the vampire needn't leave the house during the day. In later years Kevin's vampire takes the form of a stalker wearing a beret. In this form the vampire watches Kevin at the beach, follows him on a bike through the park and accosts him in a movie theatre. But the vampire "doesn't like mothers or daughters" and Kevin always feels protected when his mother is with him.
But mostly the vampire manifests himself in subtle ways - as a noise, or a stirring in the air, reminiscent of the first vampire movie Kevin saw in a Scouts Hall, "the images in black and white, on a sheet pinned to the tongue and groove wall, confused me, but I can still hear the sound: the humming of bats' or vampires' wings, like the humming of high-voltage electricity wires - though I don't think vampires had wings, their opera capes just seemed like wings." pg 13. This manifestation eventually becomes like a curse, or an omen and surrounds key events in the novel.
Kevin is also shadowed by, and in turn shadows and impersonates another who looks just like him - Gerald Spain who resides in the more affluent Southside of Dublin. In turn Gerald pretends to be Kevin when it suits him.
Publisher: John Murray
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