Publisher's Synopsis
Who, then, pulls the strings of the puppet master? Who watches the watcher? Here lies the ultimate terror of both the puppet and its master, a question that winds its way through the heart like a serpent.
In a city where shadows move with minds of their own, Kyle, a puppeteer with trembling hands and a haunted soul, toils away in the dim recesses of his basement. He is crafting a marionette named Tintagiles for a play shrouded in mystery and melancholy: The Death of Tintagiles, penned by the somber hand of Maurice Maeterlinck.
Kyle's life, once filled with the light of his beloved wife Moira, now lingers in twilight. Moira, struck down by a cruel seizure, lies in a coma, suspended between life and death. Kyle, drowning in alcohol, cannot face the harrowing decision to end her suffering, leaving her to drift in the gray ether of a vegetative state.
As Kyle's mind frays, the marionette he molds begins to stir with a life all its own. Tintagiles, with eyes that gleam with uncanny light, becomes more than wood and string.
In a fevered climax, Tintagiles, now fully awakened, takes the stage for a rehearsal. Enveloped in the world of the play, the marionette believes Kyle to be the wicked Queen, a dark specter looming over his existence. Breaking from the confines of the script, Tintagiles draws a sword, a sharp relic Kyle had fashioned from an old letter opener. With resolute fury, the marionette, clutching the sword in its wooden jaws, sets out to slay the imagined beast high above.
Climbing his own strings, Tintagiles seeks to rescue his sisters, Ygraine and Bellangere, from the clutches of the malevolent phantom. In this surreal and poignant moment, the boundaries blur between creator and creation, reality and illusion, love and despair.
