Tillinghast
In keeping with trends to make the undead more personable, Reverend Stutley Tillinghast is a vampire with a conscience. He only kills when he must and likes to think there is nothing personal in it. Overcome by this detached force of nature, his victims are in the wrong place at the wrong time. He is a methodical, cautious and somewhat abstemious killer who makes thorough and well-practised dispatch of bodies on his repellent, isolated homestead.
Interestingly, he also has precise plans for his own annihilation. This controlled pragmatism, and his ostensible status as a local pastor, a nominal figure in a broken down, clapboard church of no congregation, has been keeping him safe for over a century. This all changes when a young girl arrives in town bearing his name, searching for a woman lost from his past, whose memory has persisted throughout his twilight life. The girl becomes dangerously sick, and not knowing why, Tillinghast takes her in. Providing what he believes she forces him out of his careful routines as they begin to discover who they are to one another.
Cavenagh is particularly good at tense encounters with the innocents who accidentally cross the vampire’s path and the frisson of the uncanny which they feel. Neither Tillinghast nor the reader knows whether they will survive their encounter.
This is a contemporary novel, which only slips into the past when Tillinghast writes of his early life in a long suicide note. His confession has a persuasively 19th-century tone and sensibilities, a distinctive interiority from that which takes us through the novel. I like the concept of a vampire whose reclusive existence is threatened by an intrusive digital modernity, as though, like Tillinghast, the genre must seek out new ways to thrive. This debut makes for a convincing update.
