Angel Gelique
Hillary: Tail of the Dog

Fifteen-year-old Hillary Greyson awakens from a horrific nightmare only to face an even grimmer reality. She’s being held captive by two male doctors and a woman — supposedly for her own good. Hillary has no memory as to who she is or how she ended up confined to a bed in an empty room, trapped, with little chance of escaping.

Stripped of her clothing and dignity, abused and neglected, Hillary can only hope that someone will come looking for her… that someone will find her before it’s too late. She knows that with each passing day, her chance of survival diminishes. She refuses to give up, though, no matter how hopeless it seems. Hillary knows she’ll find a way somehow. She yearns for her freedom more than anything in the world.

Hillary just wants to go home…

For too long to be fooled by the cover, this book was rather a shadowy existence in my bookshelf.
Yes, the plot sounded good, the reviews promised a sick slaughter…
…but somehow I could not and did not really want to be able to imagine that.

To often I had to read how good a book is, until I had to figure out, that there are different tastes in the world.
I mean, come on, seriously: the cover is horrible, the synonym is… "strange" – but the reviews; and the plot…
It could be a masterpiece, but also it could be a disaster – I had to figure out…

Well, so or so, it took another couple of months for me to give Hillary: Tail of the Dog a chance…

… how could I be so stupid to leave the book so long?!

A young girl – 15, maybe 16 years old …

Already here it should be clear, that we weave along one of this many famous limits – maybe even walk right on it: children.
So it’s said from the beginning, that this book, that this trilogy, is about a girl (a child); that it is Splatterpunk and you have to expect sexual violence!

…limits.
Jack Ketchum’s (†) terrific work The Girl Next Door latest has shown, that a limit is just the moment of hesitation, that reality does not know.
And like Ketchum, Angel Gelique knows about this reality…

With Hillary: Tail of the Dog Angel Gelique’s lets grow, lets develop the beginning of her trilogy about Hillary – a girl who wakes up naked and with no memory in the unknown.
Tied to a bed, stared by strangers, catechized…
…and touched.
The only thing left to her is the will to escape – is the will to remember…
…the only thing left to her, is her will!

They say they wanted to help her, but do not let her go.
They say everything is cleared, but do not let her talk to others.
They ask, what she can remember – ask so many things, always say the same…
…THEY LIE!

Whatever happened, these people are lying and Hillary is completely at their mercy…

Angel Gelique is not in hurry. She’s literally flatters the nightmares you never want to talk about. She doesn’t just make the reader smell the sweat, that wets the delicate skin – she aphrodisiacs the innocence; the prelude of the ultimate consequence, becomes a lascivious dance of inevitability.

About three quarters of the book you read about Hillary – read about the unknown, the girl, the innocence; the question, the uncertainty about the reason – ultimately the certainty, about this unspeakable, that is waiting behind this blue eyes.

About three quarters of the book you’re reading about Hillary …

…and then you experience her!

Angel Gelique balances on an ethical frontier, less cautiously, than sometimes with alarming certainty.
Hillary: Tail of the Dog is not a typical Revenge-Torture-novel. Instead of wallowing in the bloodbath, Angel Gelique lets Hillary grow – not the massacre is in the foreground here, but the human being; the girl and her story.
The actual cruelty is thus found less in the last quarter of the book, as in the understanding of her actions.

The literal unleashing of Hillary is a display of irrepressible hatred. Angel Gelique manages to portray the delusion, the rampant drive of revenge, as the pure essence of the lust for murder. Instead of a massacre, here the supremacy of death is celebrated. From the initial psycho-thriller about the mystery of a girl and his kidnapper, emerges a splatterpunk-thriller par excellence:
Jack Ketchum’s The Girl next Door (Warner Books, 1989) meets Ryan C. Thomas‘ The Summer I died (Coscom Entertainment, 2009).
A female Matt Shaw, with Millers brutality, Whites attention to detail and O’Rourkes terror – a disgusting (and this is to be understood as a great compliment) composition of the extreme of human morbidity.

In a certain and quite grotesque way, Angel Gelique has created a morbid anti-hero with Hillary, you’ll forgive at the moment of judgment – you’ll judge at the moment of forgiveness…

…you have to pardon her, because you can not forgive her!

Hillary Greyson: The other girl next door…