HALLOWEEN 2018 in Transylania - Romania!

                                                                               MAY 2012
                  

PRESS-RELEASE
Russian TSD Chapter

In March, the 2nd online literary contest for Russian-speaking authors from all over the world writing about vampires “Transylvania 2012” came to an end. The contest has been organized by the Russian Chapter of the TSD and Truebloodsite.org since last year; we really hope that the event will become annual. So far, the first two contests were quite successful and interesting for both writers and readers.
This time the winner in the long prose nomination was a young author Bjartur Dagur with his novel “Higher and Higher”.

The novel “Higher and Higher” sends us to the Iceland folklore about the Undead (draugar). But it doesn’t take us into ancient times; it manages to combine the traditional theme about ghosts with quite modern stories.
A Reykjavik police department gets some information able to shed the light on a mysterious disappearance of a student from the Iceland University which took place a few years ago. Two detectives begin checking the new information. They must decide whether it makes sense to continue their investigation. Soon it became clear that each of them has their own, special point of view. The lady-detective is sure that the student is alive and had to escape from the country because of some dismal mystery, while her colleague tries to find the murderers as he believes that the man is dead. This rivalry makes the detectives follow their own ways and thoughts each. One of the main questions is: what did the missing guy know? What did force him to leave the city in a terrible hurry? Who could wish him to die, take his life in the darkness?

Beginning as a standard detective story, the book little by little loses the elements, typical for this genre. At the same time it shows the small pieces of mysticism while without staking on them too much. Mysticism is described as an integral part of reality; the supernatural background serves just as an occasion to tell us about great value of human life and, though it sounds paradoxical, about value of death. The novel is a sequel of a trilogy about vampires, in the centre of which there is a fate of a man and a fate of a vampire. The spiritual development, the way of one of the main character of this trilogy (a lady-detective) from belief to disappointment and back is closely connected with the theme of the salvation of all things in existence. From time to time the fates of the characters are intertwined; then, part again… but each time this fact sets the characters at defiance. Very often they must decide the similar questions; but will the decisions made by the Undead and a human be the same?   In addition to the main theme of a trilogy each part of it shows the development of some separate idea – like growing up, loneliness, self-sacrifice.

Some words about the author: it’s a young writer creating under the name Bjartur Dagur. He started working with vampire topic a few years ago; besides the trilogy the man had written some short stories about vampires. His works haven’t been published before.

TSD  2012