The Silver Kiss

The 1990 young adult novel The Silver Kiss by Annette Curtis Klause combines the genres of supernatural horror and romance to follow the story of a young woman trying to both cope with the slow death of her mother from cancer and with her own growing attachment to a vampire. Klause uses the tropes of vampirism to allow her protagonist to learn to accept and heal from grief – and also to build a suspenseful chase narrative as the pair are forced to confront a dangerous evil vampire serial killer. The novel is written from two points of view, alternating chapters between the grieving Zoe and her vampire love interest Simon.

Zoe Sutcliff is a sixteen-year-old whose life has fallen apart recently after her mother was diagnosed with untreatable cancer. As her mother lies dying in the hospital, Zoe’s father, unable to cope with this tragedy in a healthy way, starts to slowly withdraw both from his life and from his daughter.

Neglected and in shock, Zoe turns for support to her best friend, Lorraine. However, Lorraine, who is at a low point in her difficult relationship with her own mother, has no idea what to say to Zoe to comfort her. Soon, even this small island of normality is lost as Lorraine moves away to Oregon with her family, leaving Zoe on her own.



In the meantime, Simon is a three-hundred-year-old vampire who, turned at the age of nineteen, still looks like an older teenager – with just a sheen of silver on his hair and skin. Simon was born in England, but has spent the last centuries tracking a vicious killer vampire across Europe and now across the U.S. Though Simon has killed to feed himself, he is oppressed by his guilt about it, and has now figured out a way to feed on humans without killing them.

One night, Simon stumbles on Zoe in a nearby park and they are immediately captivated by each other’s beauty. In the tradition of most romantic vampires, Simon starts stalking Zoe. Eventually, she invites him into her house, and they share their stories, worlds, and loneliness with each other.

It turns out that they have something in common: Simon also suffered his mother’s death when he was young – she was murdered by the same killer vampire that he’s been following for revenge. Meeting Zoe is the first time that he has had anything other than revenge in his life for hundreds of years. As they discuss their grief, Zoe asks Simon to turn her mother into a vampire as a way of saving her, but Simon refuses – being a vampire is terrible.



As they grow closer, Zoe tells Lorraine about Simon, but doesn’t mention that he’s a vampire from seventeenth-century England. For his part, Simon has to always be careful to control his beastly urge to feed on Zoe whenever they are together.

Finally, Simon reveals everything about himself. The killer vampire that he is tracking is Christopher, his older brother, who both killed their mother and turned Simon.

Christopher was turned into a vampire when he was six years old, so he still looks like a little kid – and has a small child’s inability to control his urges or care about other people’s suffering. Since Christopher has been a vampire for longer than Simon has (Simon was a baby when Christopher was turned), Christopher is too powerful for Simon; that’s why Simon’s attempts to kill him have failed so far. Now, as women around town are being found dead, we learn that Christopher attacks by pretending to be a little lost boy, guiding people to a dark alley while asking them for help, and then killing them.



Knowing he needs help with his mission, Simon reluctantly asks Zoe for help and she agrees. Together they set a trap in the park: they dig a deep hole and stick a bunch of sharp silver knives into it so that anyone who falls into the hole would be impaled. Zoe then lures Christopher into the park with the plan for Simon to ambush Christopher and make him fall in.

This plan is derailed by two neighborhood boys, who, frightened by Simon, run away from him in different directions. One falls into the hole and dies. Christopher, tipped off to the fact that Zoe is luring him into a trap, tries to turn the tables on his brother and kill him via knife-hole instead. However, eventually, Simon prevails. Christopher falls into the hole, the knives pierce his flesh, turning him human, and he dies because he is actually hundreds of years old.

After the fight, Simon realizes that he has no reason to continue his existence. He and Zoe have sex, profess their love, and then Simon dies after exposing himself to the sun as it comes up the next morning.