Catching Cat.

The scarce limited edition, inscribed and SIGNED by the author on the second front free endpaper: ".from 'Firefly' / Athan Y. Chilton / August 26, 1993". Black cloth-covered boards, gilt lettering on spine and front board, 11 1/4 x 8 3/4 inches, 393 pp., 8 full page color illustrations. Fine. Good quality printing and binding. Quite scarce; no OCLC library holdings. "Any resemblance of these characters to individuals living, dead, or undead - is unintentional." The following book review says it all: "The following is adapted from material that originally appeared in the column "Vampires in Print" in _The Vampire's Crypt_ #9 (Spring 1994). Review by Cathy Krusberg. _Catching Cat_ originated with a short story that first appeared right here on VAMPYRES, where the author is better known as our very own Firefly! "Catching Cat" grew into a novel that was serialized on VAMPYRES, then revised and published as a limited-edition hardcover. The hardcover sold out with astonishing speed, and in response to continuing demand, Firefly cut a deal with Hupe and Kennedy for distribution of a "fanzine" edition that retains the full text of the original (about 300 pages) AND the author's eight full-page *color* illustrations. Set in 1968 San Francisco, _Catching Cat_ is told from the perspective of Paul Leluvo, the drummer in Magical Merlin's Band. Paul knows there is something magical, something mysterious about the band's vocalist Callina Russell -- but isn't that always true of someone you love? Paul and Calli's nighttime ride up Mount Tamalpais starts as a joyride, ends as a would-be tragedy -- a tragedy transformed by a shadow that rescues Paul and Calli from the burning wreckage of a head-on collision, transformed with Paul himself, by a Cat who is his beloved Calli. Thus suddenly, with no planning and no motive but a young vampire's love and determination, Paul begins a new mode of existence which has not only its own attendant dangers from the sun but, superadded to them, an old vampire's vendetta. That wreck was no accident. Someone wants to wipe Callina off the face of the earth. That someone is an old and powerful vampire; not one of the oldest or most powerful, but old and powerful enough, for all that: Charn of silver hair and unsmiling ways. To Charn it seems that this Callina flaunts herself; she sings before audiences with a hippie band; surely her conduct violates the vampire law of secrecy from mortals that Charn has always known. Getting her out of he way is a first important step on Charn's political agenda. And at Charn's side is Strigo, dark-haired and volatile, a less than willing accomplice assigned to Charn by representatives of the vampires' Council of Elders. Strigo protests Charn's desire to destroy the fledgling without so much as speaking to her first: surely the Elders would not consent to this if they knew, for another law of vampires is that they do not kill their own kind. While Charn plots and the elders observe and ponder, Paul adapts, with the aid of Callina and the one who turned her -- an old friend of Paul's, saxophonist Rene du Baisser, and the one who turned *him*, Marliese Hasse. With the change in Paul's nature come strange dreams, dreams of long ago, of Paul's dream-persona tribe and a tribe called the Moon People. They are peoples of a gentler world, the world of Paul and Calli's forebears who had neither fangs nor a law to dictate that they hold separate from the other tribe or make killing a part of feding. It is a dream not unprecedented, for the one who turned Marliese spoke it and was nearly exiled for what the Elders considered heresy. The persistent and powerful dream transmits itself from Paul to Calli and from Calli to her audiences -- for, Paul's change notwithstanding, Magical Merlin's Band continues. One night Magical Merlin's plays at the Fillmore, to an audience high on pot, hashish, acid, and anything else they can lay hands to -- and to representatives of the Council of Elders,as.…