"Alice, I live next door to a man who is half-clockwork and can control the weather. Both he and his best friend were kidnapped by Faeries. Both he and I passed through a Rift into an entirely new dimension. I now have the ability to leave my body for dead and become a ghost. And before any of that, I managed to bring a corpse back from the grave by inadvertently proposing marriage to it," Victor says, deadpan. "I have to say, it appears I thrive on madness."

More seriously, he adds, "I really do want to make this work. I don't know how, yet -- I mean, you can't keep disappearing off to here, and I can't visit your world -- if I'm not the right Victor for it, there will be confusion, but it might be worse if I am -- but I want to."