Night Relics - Softcover

Blaylock, James P.

3.58

219 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0425153193 ISBN 13: 9780425153192

Publisher: Berkley, 1996

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Attempting to come to terms with a failed marriage and longing for his son, Peter Travers's struggle to build a new life is haunted by mysterious visions of a woman and child as the spirits of the past come alive and a dark and terrible secret refuses to die. Reprint.

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From Kirkus Reviews:

Fairly orthodox ghost story set in the California hill country, from the author of The Paper Grail, Lord Kelvin's Machine, etc. Peter Travers is trying to put his failed marriage behind him and enter into a new relationship with girlfriend Beth. But he keeps seeing--or hallucinating--scenes from his marriage, and hearing a woman's screams far off in the night. Soon after a visit from his wife Amanda and son David, Peter discovers that they have disappeared; two bodies, a woman's and a child are reported lying in a pool higher up the canyon where Peter lives--but the bodies also vanish. Meanwhile, developer Lance Klein is attempting to buy up the properties in the canyon, hoping to make a real-estate killing; his agent is Barney Pomeroy, a dangerous blackmailer and obsessed voyeur who haunts Beth's dwelling and who tries to drive out another resident, Mr. Ackroyd, by putting dead rats in the old man's water tank. Ackroyd, meantime, has also heard the screams and has seen a black-clad woman and a child walking beneath the trees; but he refuses to discuss key events--a tragic love affair, a brutal murder--that occurred 70 years before. Superb characters and setting, in a plot that meshes seamlessly--the single cavil being that it goes on too long: we learn what's happening well before the characters do. -- Copyright �1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

Blaylock's characters are subjected to the visitations of unquiet spirits and otherwise frightening events in this good but uneven first ghost-story offering from this award-winning fantasy novelist ( Lord Kelvin's Machine ). Seventy years ago in southwest California, Dr. Landry killed his wife's lover when he found them together; she then flung herself and her illegitimate son over a nearby cliff. Dr. Landry disappeared. Unaware of the bloody murder, architectural draftsman Peter Travers now lives in the Landrys' old cabin. When his ex-wife Amanda and their son David disappear just before the two are to go on a vacation to Hawaii, Travers's anguish is exacerbated by the appearance of ghostly apparitions, some of whom seem to be Amanda and David, while others are the figures of those involved in the earlier tragedy. Also plagued by spectral visitations are Lance Klein, a real estate developer with a shady past and Bernard Pomeroy, a deeply disturbed salesman with an eye for blackmail. While the tale is marked by good prose, believable dialogue and fine description, the plot soon wears thin. Travers's search for Amanda and David is almost totally eclipsed by the machinations of Pomeroy and his interplay with Klein, and the ghostly visions never produce the frisson of horror that this genre requires.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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