And Falling, Fly

The angel of desire is damned.

Olivia is a vampire bored with modernity. Tattooist, boyfriend, black-metal singer: everyone you don’t love tastes the same. She returns to Ireland’s subterranean L’Otel Matillide – the Hotel of the Damned – to bury her hope with her severed wings.

In this flame-papered, inertia-powered hotel, Olivia encounters Dominic O’Shaunnessey, a revolutionary neuroscientist secretly plagued by impossible visions. Dominic, convinced that Olivia is delusional and not damned, urges her to enroll in his research. His medication, he asserts, can cure her of mythology. She counters that his hallucinations are past-life memories and part of an ancient curse of repeated, remembered incarnations.

In a secret Hell where billionaires and burned-out rock stars mingle with ancient and allegorical beings, Olivia and Dominic discover the only force consistent between their opposing realities is the deep, erotic gravity between them. Bound to each other finally in a knot of interwoven freedoms, Dominic and Olivia – the vision-touched scientist and the earth-bound angel, reborn and undead – encounter the mystery of love: it is both fall and flight.