The Uncanny - Tapa blanda

"Trolls.... That's what it was. Religious people believed God ran the world. Atheists figured it was indifferent nature. But it was trolls. Sadistic little homunculi in leather jackets with lots of zippers. Hiding behind the scrim of being. Working the machinery to maximize human suffering for their own amusement." A wealthy Hollywood cowboy-cum-movie-producer travels to England in the hope of seeing a ghost, or a voice from beyond: "Something uncanny, you know. Anything. One lousy uncanny thing." He hangs out with a marvellous old woman--a professional sceptic armed with a sword cane and an ever- puffing pipe with a skull-shaped bowl--and the other staff of a semi-tabloid rag called Bizarre! He meets the woman of his dreams, who is billed as being utterly inaccessible and frigid to boot. Then before you can say "conspiracy theory", Andrew Klavan has whipped all of them into a humorous confection with elements of German Romantic art, English Gothic architecture, 19th-century ghost stories, Norse mythology, South American cult leaders, Nazi witchcraft and the Holy Grail. Even the ghost of M.R. James has a key role in the plot. (It's not a deep novel--you get the sense that Klavan doesn't take one iota of it seriously--but it's good supernatural fun.')

#NAME? ('Andrew Klavan is very close to seeing his place within the superleague of American street-writers')

OBSERVER ('A gripping page-turner.')

TIME OUT ('Impressive.cooly detached, immensely detailed and totally convincing.')

When American film director Richard Storm first comes to London, he has his own secret mission. Part vacation, part research, he finds renewed purpose working at a curious magazine of weird phenomena, 'Bizarre'. The owner/editor is herself a curiosity and opens up an extraordinary new world - of strange but true hauntings, hunts and spirit worship. When Richard is introduced to beautiful heiress Sophia Endering, he finds himself helplessly in love with her. But she is as dangerous to herself as she is for those who love her - for she has an almost unstoppable death wish. Strange forces are at work and the uncanny twists of fate which brought Richard to London have something much more apocalyptic in store...