Chapelwood
The Borden Dispatches
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4.1 • 9 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
From Cherie Priest, the award-winning author of Maplecroft, comes a new tale of Lizzie Borden’s continuing war against the cosmic horrors threatening humanity…
Birmingham, Alabama is infested with malevolence. Prejudice and hatred have consumed the minds and hearts of its populace. A murderer, unimaginatively named “Harry the Hacker” by the press, has been carving up citizens with a hatchet. And from the church known as Chapelwood, an unholy gospel is being spread by a sect that worships dark gods from beyond the heavens.
This darkness calls to Lizzie Borden. It is reminiscent of an evil she had dared hoped was extinguished. The parishioners of Chapelwood plan to sacrifice a young woman to summon beings never meant to share reality with humanity. An apocalypse will follow in their wake which will scorch the earth of all life.
Unless she stops it…
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Setting this slow but effective second Lizzie Borden/H.P. Lovecraft mashup in the 1920s, three decades after the events of Maplecroft, Priest emphasizes Lovecraft's storytelling elements of mathematics, spiritualism, the dubious cultural values of the early-20th-century American Deep South, and mind-shatteringly monstrous beings. The convergence of the actions of members of the congregation of the titular Chapelwood Estate, a church with a "patriotic Southern bent," and a series of axe-murders (initially drawing little attention, due to the ethnicity and occupations of the victims), compel Inspector Simon Wolf and Lizbeth Andrew (formerly Borden) to visit Birmingham, Ala. Ruth Stephenson, a 20-year-old medium, is an unwitting linchpin in the plans of those who strive to control cosmic balances, one of a select few residents of Birmingham to make a stand against the corruption of their community. Multiple narrators slow the already sedate pace, but that contributes to the story's atmosphere of inexorable menace, as does the grim history Priest draws on.
