Tillinghast

Stutley Tillinghast presents himself as the minister of a remote rural parish in Rhode Island, but the role is a cover. He has lived far longer than any ordinary man, and for decades his few human encounters have been short, frenzied and fatal, each one ending in a shallow grave in his cellar. He avoids the word for what he is. To him it is plain enough: he has needs, and when they grow unbearable he meets them. In all his long, lonely life he has known just one other creature like himself, the woman who made him what he is and for whom he still longs.

His isolation breaks when a girl comes to the parish looking for him. She carries the Tillinghast name and looks startlingly like that woman, which stirs memories he has worked hard to bury. The pull he feels toward her is instant and overwhelming. She is also gravely ill, with symptoms he knows all too well, and he alone knows how to save her.

Clare Cavenagh's debut draws on the real nineteenth-century vampire panic of New England. It works as atmospheric, tense horror that upends the familiar monster story, and as a literary novel with striking prose about what it means to give in to impulse or to fight it. At its heart is a moving bond between father and daughter, one that leaves room for hope and has readers rooting for its killers against their better instincts.