Synopsis
When Koot Parganas accidently breaks a plaster statue venerated by his parents, he unwittingly unleashes the ghost of Thomas Alva Edison, leading to an alternately terrifying and hilarious adventure in the strange underbelly of contemporary Los Angeles.
Reviews
The playful spirit of Lewis Carroll's Alice books-"the Old and New Testament for ghosts," as one character in this screwball supernatural comedy puts it-live on in World Fantasy Award-winning Powers's latest dazzler (after Last Call). The ghosts here aren't malevolent specters but lingering essences of the dead that are snorted and ingested by spirit junkies for the rush of memories they yield. When 11-year-old Koot Hoomie Parganas becomes possessed by the ghost of Thomas Alva Edison, a feeding frenzy begins among West Coast ghost eaters eager to absorb the great inventor's genius. Kootie's efforts to elude his pursuers eventually dovetail with electrical engineer Pete Sullivan's quest to prevent his evil stepmother from eating the ghost of his father and thus covering up her complicity in his death. Powers builds this world on a wacky foundation of physics and metaphysics, and he peoples it with eccentrics like Sherman Oaks, a one-armed ghost hunter who detects his quarry with his phantom limb, and Nicky Bradfield, a deceased teen celebrity who subsists entirely on cinnamon candy. Although filled with routine chase sequences, the novel is a minefield of exploding surprises that will have readers convinced that the author has tapped into a more magical reality behind everyday life.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Powers' brand of magic realism has a following of critics and readers who almost universally praised his Last Call (1992). His new novel conjures the gritty underworld of a select group of Southern California addicts. The unusual wrinkle in their addiction is that their drugs of choice are ghosts. In Powers' scenario, the lives of disembodied spirits can be extended indefinitely when they are inhaled, and such spirits are prized collector's items for LA hobo and sometime spirit dealer Sherman Oaks. When runaway preteen Kootie Parganas accidentally sniffs an uncorked test tube found inside a bust of Dante, he not only finds himself haunted by memories of another life, but discovers that his parents have been brutally murdered and their killer--Oaks--is now out after him. Fortunately for Kootie, the spirit he has inhaled is that of Thomas Edison, who, even as a spook, still has plenty of brainstorms left in his arsenal. Powers' quirky vision may baffle fans of more conventional fantasy, but his colorful characters and delightful sense of the absurd should continue to attract new readers. Carl Hays
A young boy accidentally unleashes the ghost of Thomas Edison on an unsuspecting contemporary Los Angeles in this latest novel by the author of Last Call (Morrow, 1992).
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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