Portent - Softcover

Herbert, James

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0061054321 ISBN 13: 9780061054327

Publisher: Harper Voyager, 1997

Synopsis

From Britain's acclaimed master of dark fantasy comes this terrifying new novel of an epic struggle against evil in the midst of environmental catastrophe.

Around the world, forces of unimaginable violence are being unleashed -- earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, deadly hailstorms -- all signs of a coming titanic struggle between the forces of darkness and light. This is the story of two very special children who unknowingly hold the future of the planet in their hands... and the grotesque matriarch of a bizarre New Orleans cult who is determined to destroy them.

"Delivers a breathtaking finish, its dazzling special effects conveyed with the panache of a literary Steven Spielberg." --London Sunday Times

About this title

About the Author

James Herbert is not just Britain's No. 1 bestselling writer of chiller fiction, a position he has held since publication of his first novel, but is one of our greatest popular novelists, whose books are sold in thirty-five other languages, including Russian and Chinese. Widely imitated and hugely influential, his twenty novels have sold more than 50 million copies worldwide.

From Kirkus Reviews

Herbert's 18th horror novel works toward another of his familiar apocalyptic climaxes (The Ghosts of Sleath, 1995, etc.) but features perhaps his finest writing. British climatologist James Rivers flies into the blissfully calm eye of a huge hurricane over the Gulf of Mexico and sees a strange ball of light hanging outside his plane just before he crashes. Recovering back home, Rivers is invited by the eccentric Hugo Poggs to his country estate, where Poggs shares the results of his research into the vast natural disturbances suddenly sweeping the world. Is Mother Earth shrugging man off the planet because of what he's done to her? Rivers falls in with Hugo's widowed daughter-in-law Diane, who has adopted Romanian gypsy twins, Eva and Josh--children who are seemingly telepathic, given to visions and to alarming messages about the near future. Earth tremors shake London, tidal waves wipe out Grenada and Oahu, huge forest fires spring up in Brazil, Australia's Great Barrier Reef is destroyed, cyclones sweep the Great Plains, undersea volcanoes erupt, the San Andreas Fault splits, all heralded by portentous balls of light. Rivers, a troubled skeptic, keeps stumbling across evidence indicating that these lights are neither accidental nor mere by- products of natural phenomena. When the twins tell him that he is part of the Dream Man, a benign figure in their visions, Diane, Rivers, and the twins set off to Scotland's lochs in search of another such Dream Man. Through him, Rivers finds that these horrors portending the Last Days actually express man's inner nature writ large upon Earth, the Great Mother. To survive, man must change. This may be Herbert's best novel, its prose keen, characters crisp, and pace terrific, though the world-shattering end is disappointly unsurprising and generic. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Voyager
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0061054321
• ISBN 13: 9780061054327
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 368