Synopsis
An epic tale of horror, spanning twenty years in the lives of four friends?witnesses to unearthly terror. The high desert town of Palmetto, California, has turned toxic after twenty years of nightmares. In Los Angeles, a woman is tormented by visions from a chilling past, and a man steps into a house of torture. On the steps of a church, a young woman has been sacrificed in a ritual of darkness. In New York, a cab driver dreams of demons while awake. And a man who calls himself the Desolation Angel has returned to draw his old friends back to their hometown?a town where, two decades earlier, three boys committed the most brutal of rituals, an act of such intense savagery that it has ripped apart their minds. And where, in a cavern in a place called No Man's Land, something has been waiting a long time for those who stole something more precious than life itself.
Reviews
Clegg gained attention last year for Naomi, his serialized horror novel that, arguably, was the first major work of fiction to originate in cyberspace. Genre cognoscenti, however, know him also for several acclaimed earlier novels, including The Halloween Man. Clegg's new book, which marks his first hardcover publication under his own name, is as powerful literarily and morally as anything he's written. Densely textured in plot, language and character, it tells of the 1980 destruction of the body and soul of a small desert town in California and of the resolution, 20 years later, of that supernaturally created holocaust; past and present mingle throughout, as if in a dream. The act of dreaming is a primary motif in the book, for the agent of destruction, Lamia ("lamia was fluid from steamy swamps... always feeding from the dying... until a depraved animal walking on two feet learned to pass lamia, to cultivate and worship lamia, to call it god, then demon...."), who, manifested in the body of a beautiful teenage girl, bends the reality of those upon whom she feeds, psychically and physically. Set amid the town's squalor of trailer parks, organized dogfights and fevered relationships of those with no escape, and also in the hard streets of Manhattan, a drug den in Los Angeles and elsewhere, the novel reads like a nightmare on paper as Clegg traces the fates of several of Lamia's victims. His imagery is intense, horrific, sexually violent--patricide, incestuous rape and cannibalism are among the crimes he envisions--but he paints with a poet's hand. Despite its monstrousness, his vision tenders a kind of hope; Lamia's destructive powers are balanced by another's force for healing, and, at novel's end, one victim recognizes the power of "grace." This is horror at its finest. (Mar.) FYI: Also in March but after Cemetery Dance's publication of this novel, Dorchester/Leisure will release a mass market edition ($5.99 400p ISBN 0-8439-4695-4).
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