The Uncanny
A Novel
-
-
4.8 • 6 Ratings
-
-
- $5.99
Publisher Description
Andrew Klavan reinvents the classic ghost story with this literary X-Files, a breathtaking blend of Hollywood-style excitement and literary tour de force.
Richard Storm is a Hollywood producer who has reached the top of his profession making horror movies based on classic English ghost stories. Now, with his life beginning to unravel, he flees to England on a desperate quest: to find evidence that the great old stories bear an element of truth, that the human spirit lives on after death, that in this all-too-material world there still may be reason to have faith.
But his search uncovers more than he bargained for: Sophia Endering, a mysterious damsel in distress who may just be the last love of Storm's life; Harper Albright, an eccentric pipe-smoking old woman whose researches into the paranormal mask an obsessive hunt for a malevolent killer; and the man known as Saint Iago, a seemingly immortal villain who makes a night with a vampire look like a walk in the park.
Richard Storm's nightmares are about to step down off the screen into real life. And Storm is about to begin a journey through his deepest passions and his darkest fears, to a romance that could last forever, and a secret a thousand years old-down a trail formed by the classic ghost stories themselves-into the very heart of the uncanny.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Thriller fans who expect the unexpected from Klavan (True Crime) won't find that anticipation dashed with his new novel, a series of clever riffs on the classic ghost story. The main plot follows the adventures of Richard Storm, 40, a producer of Hollywood horror films who's come to England to work on Bizarre! magazine, find a real-life ghost story and, perhaps, win some emotional relief from the cancer rotting his brain. At a party, Richard reads aloud "Black Annie," the ghost story that inspired his career (which story Klavan presents in all its neo-gothic glory, as one of several ghost tales embedded in the narrative). One partygoer, beautiful Sophia Endering, drops her glass in shock while listening. She, Richard learns, has lived some of the events of "Black Annie," which centers around the sacrifice of a youngster--a sacrifice explained through an ancient tale recorded by the great dark fantasist M.R. James (whose widow makes a cameo here). The sacrifice is also depicted in an ancient, disassembled triptych now sought by a diabolical presence known as St. Iago, because the triptych, when whole, reveals the secret to immortality--and its terrible price. Klavan pulls out all the stops, repeatedly blindsiding the reader with shifts in plot, tone and point of view, peopling his tale with wild eccentrics and wilder settings, winking at the genre but honoring it too, right through the over-the-top climax set in a ruined abbey on a dark and stormy night. Not all of the Sturm und Drang works (Klavan's principals, especially, are more caricature than character), but suspense is high, the fun factor higher, and Klavan, cackling all the while, demonstrates again that his ability to make a genre his own is simply... uncanny. Foreign rights sold in the U.K., Germany and Italy.
