The High Place

Award-winning author, narrator, and screenwriter Neil Gaiman personally selected this book, and, using the tools of the Audiobook Creation Exchange (ACX), cast the narrator and produced this work for his audiobook label, Neil Gaiman Presents.

A few words from Neil on The High Place: THE HIGH PLACE: A COMEDY OF DISENCHANTMENT is what happens to the story of Sleeping Beauty when told as a cautionary – yet somehow rollicking – fairy tale. Our hero – if hero we may call a man who’s just murdered each of his four wives – is the elegant and aristocratic Florian de Puysange….Florian is everyone’s dream of an amoral protagonist, all elegance and flourish, witty and urbane, a complete cad who acts on every pleasure it occurs to him to desire...and he gets away with it. UNTIL it all comes due.

In the sulphurous The High Place, the amoral hero Florian enters the sleeping-beauty story and (unlike Jurgen with Helen) does not draw back at the sight of excessive beauty. Complications ensue: Beauty is realistically diminished during pregnancy, the first-born child is forfeit to Satan under the pact that guaranteed Florain's success, and an irascible saint is eager to call down holy fire on transgressors. Florian treads close to damnation and is saved only when Satan and the angel Michael conspire to let recent events become, again, a dream: he has a rare second chance and learns better.