A novella.
Actually there’s a few things that are pretty damned lethal – basically anything with a sufficient concentration of carbon in it. And it took me – what? – a few months to find that out. The elders still think the worst they have to worry about is some mad Hun with a sharpened table-leg...
In a darkly comic monologue, 12K words of black satire, a vampire scientist leads his somewhat flighty sire-mate on a tour of the laboratory where he's studying the not-so-glorious downsides to eternal life: like the potential of D65 industrial illuminant to cause "catastrophic system failure"; or the acid rain caused by two thousand years of holy water evaporating into the atmosphere.
Lucky for both of them, our vamp of science has their sire safely locked away from harm's reach. And, yes, that new undead experimental subject/helper really is quite fascinating... almost seems to have initiative.
What could possibly go wrong?
Hal Duncan is a Scottish science fiction and fantasy writer based in Glasgow. A graduate of Glasgow University, his first book, Vellum, about a war between heaven and hell, was released in 2005. It has since been translated into several other languages and nominated to the World Fantasy Award and Locus Award. Ink, the follow up, was released in 2007.
