A quiet but beautifully written long short story with a whiff of the vampire. It put me a little in mind of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. Ezekiel, a restorer of art (réparateur) is approached by a beautiful, mysterious woman with a commission. Partially set in the time of the French Revolution. ( )

A brief and beautifully told vampire story set in 18th century France. It begins:

There was once a man named Ezekiel Morel who was no longer a man. Some claimed he was cursed forever to roam the earth, and that he fed upon human blood. Others , that he had been a great artist when properly alive. More often, though, it was said he was a creature out of a bad fairy tale and shouldn’t exist at all. At least, not in these enlightened times.

The real Ezekiel Morel would never have claimed to be an artist, let alone a great one, although he was a painter of sorts. Réparateur, in the French which was then spoken in the city of Strasbourg where he’s once lived, was the correct term for what he did. He’d been apprenticed as an orphan to the trade of restoring the paintings and panels in churches, of which Strasbourg had, and still has, a great many….

MacLeod is a favorite author of mine of what one might dark fantasy and/or magical realism. Somehow, I missed picking up this novella back in 2013 when it was published, likely I thought I would not enjoy what seemed to be a vampire story. Clearly I was wrong, for it’s forty-four pages carries it’s own "bite". ( )