Impressive collection indeed, Fien
Gazzoid: almost. Probably we won't need a whole block for Day 4, but we'll cross that bridge when we'll come to it. For now, without further ado, here's a brief introduction to
Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers!
Gabriel Knight is a thiry-something year-old writer who also runs an antique bookshop in New Orleans, Louisiana, and precisely on
Bourbon Street, the historic
rue that runs through the entire
French Quarter. His two last books,
Fire in the Hills and
The Stalker, have been huge commercial flops but he's nonetheless struggling with a third horror novel - spare time isn't an issue, since St. George's Rare Books rarely has a customer -, this time around inspired by the string of killings that is currently terrorizing New Orleans, the so-called Voodoo Murders.
While many believe that the voodoo paraphernalia found around the victims are no more than a scare tactic - an opinion endorsed by the New Orleans Police Department as well as several different newspapers -, Gabriel has "recruited" his old pal
Franklin Mosely, whom Gabriel knows since kindergarten and who's now a police detective, to snatch otherwise classified information for his novel - that is, after promising Mosely to make him the protagonist of the story!
Gabriel may well have found the bestseller he's been looking for his entire life, but surely his nightmares have found him first. Every night, the same dream: "
The pile of wood that fuels the flames is high and broad, an enormous bonfire. The flames rear up over the heads of the crowd. Then he sees that there is something in the flames, some matter, tall and dark [...]
It's a woman. They're burning a woman. It punches into him: shock, horror, guilt. He feels a terrible guilt, although he does not know why. He's afraid, too, as he looks at her. He feels hapless and nasty - like a child caught stealing - but it's a thousand times worse, as if what he'd stolen was... Her life. [...]
Then the woman's face begin to melt. The face in the flames restructures itself into the head of a leopard. It screams at him in fury"(1). And then, always the same image: "[...]
something spins out, coming toward him, rolling in the air like a slow-motion bullet. He sees that it is only a medallion. The gold surface bears the images of a lion and a snake gripping each other in mortal combat"(2). He always tries to wake up, but he can't, not until the dream has forced him to see a man hanging by the neck from a skeletal tree. Himself. Thay is when he finally comes to his senses, usually screaming and sweating.
Grace Nakimura, his twenty-six year-old Japanese American assistant, blames these nightmares on his research into the Voodoo Murders - bad karma, as she puts it -, but truth is that Gabriel is having this very dream since he was thirteen(3), but never he had it more often than now. Could it really be somehow tied to the killings? And if so, what does the dream mean? Who is the burning woman? And what about the lions and the snakes? Being the guy that he is - jaunty, laid-back and unquestioning -, Gabriel doesn't put much thought in these questions, and while Grace fills him on the messages, he grabs his morning cup of coffee, reads his horoscope and the sets out, fires his Harley Davidson and scour the soultry streets of New Orleans in search both of inspiration and clues...
(1) Jane Jensen, Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers, Roc 1997, pp. 2 - 3
(2) Ivi, p. 4
(3) Gabriel's actual age differs between the game (30) and the novel (33, as stated in Jane Jensen, op. cit., p. 61). In Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned, we can see Gabriel's ID and the given year of birth id 1963, making him thirty at the time of Sins, thirty-one in The Beast Within and thirty-six in Blood. However, Blood states that Gabriel is thirty-tree, messing the whole thing up. For the sake of simplicity, thus, I prefer not to indicate a precise age for Gabriel and when it comes to important years of his past - the first occurrence of the dream, for example -, I'll stick to the timeline of the novel rather than the game.
