The world is in order
                     The dead below
                     The living above

This is the epigraph to Anne Hébert's novel Héloïse…. And the dead do indeed come to us in this novel….

Héloïse is no ordinary femme fatale; she's the Real Thing, a vampire and a revenant, as well as a tall, pale, beautiful woman with "night-dark hair." She needs to drink the blood of men in order to stay "alive."…

I do not think this novel will come as a surprise to anyone who read The Torrent, Hébert's collection of novella and short stories, or her novels, The Silent Rooms and Kamouraska. Sex and death, or passion and death, have always been linked together in her works, and she has often explored the theme of "mastery." Hébert's characters, if they give in to their strange passions, often suffer death of one...