There are two other major characters in the novel. His long term destination is the town of Ghyste Mortua, the details of which Lee keeps from us until the book is almost half over. Even though he is famous, when he comes to town people are often taken aback at seeing him, having thought he was a mere legend many are scared or suspicious or even hostile to him. Parl Dro is known far and wide as 'The Ghost-Killer.' He walks the roads alone, limping because of that time a ghoul bit his leg on a bridge over a raging river, using his special powers to detect and send to the next life manifestations of the living dead.

But the hero of Kill the Dead isn't a knight or a barbarian who fights ogres and dragons with a sword or axe-he's an exorcist who fights ghosts with his psychic powers and detective skills!

Whereas Sabella had been a first-person narrative about a beautiful girl who always wears black in a future milieu of interstellar travel and computerized autonomous cars, Kill the Dead was a third-person narrative about a beautiful man who always wears black in an unspecified medievlish Europeanish Dungeons & Dragonsish countryside at first it seems like one of those fantasy novels in which a mysterious stranger shows up at the village tavern, hears rumors of the local monster, then goes off to slay it. After reading only two pages I realized I had been laboring under a delusion: this book, on the surface had very little in common with Sabella. So I had been thinking of Kill the Dead as a sequel to Sabella. Isfdb lists 1980's Kill the Dead as the second entry in the two-volume Sabella series, and Kill the Dead appeared with Sabella in a hardcover omnibus produced by the Science Fiction Book Club called Sometimes, After Sunset.

Kill the dead tanith lee