until dawn

(click image to buy Perfect Circle on amazon.com)

I woke up sweaty and shaking. Tense. I has been dreaming about ghost roads again. This one was leaving an apartment complex swimming pool, and there was a little girl walking down it. She was looking back over her shoulder at me, eyes solemn behind a cheap kid's snorkeling mask, and wearing pool flippers; slow dreamy duck-steps, a trail of wet inhuman footprints disappearing into the the dim black and white houses, the humming silence.

I looked at the clock display on my VCR, but the glowing blue numbers just flashed

-00:00-

-00:00-

-00:00-

Time unstuck and drifting. The lost feeling, like when you're a kid with a fever and the night breaks around you forever.

I lay on my dingy mattress in my tiny living room, body humming with the premonition of something terrible about to happen. That copper taste in my mouth. Eyes wide in the darkness. Waiting.- Sean Stewart, Perfect Circle.

From Publishers Weekly- Ghosts are like homeless people, we are told by DK "Dead" Kennedy, the hero of World Fantasy Award winner Stewart's latest blend of magical realism and Texas regionalism: most of us look away, but he can't. This ability to see the other side complicates life tremendously (he can't drive because at night ghosts look just like the living, and he's wrecked cars avoiding them), especially when a distant cousin hires him to exorcise the ghost of a girl the cousin murdered. Part of the novel deals with DK's offbeat career as an alternative exorcist, but what Stewart seems really to focus on is how these abilities now threaten his relationships with family, both immediate and extended. DK still loves his ex-wife and is active in the life of his daughter, but comes to realize that he's like a ghost in their lives: "Not all ghosts are dead, but all are hungry." Stewart's compelling account of how DK comes to grips with his ghosts, both actual and metaphorical, is alternately poignant and hilarious, with some genuinely creepy moments and one or two powerful jolts. This compelling story is a genre title with strong potential for crossing over into the mainstream. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

I read this book in one sitting, and don't get me wrong, it's not simply an action packed page-turning drama. This is more a book that gives insite to one man's pained and heavily burdened eexistence He is acutely unique in that he is a conduit for the "undead" or put simply. ghosts. He is at a point in his life where everything is a wreck of his own making. What kept me from putting this book down was the the author Sean Stewart told DK's story. You really care for DK, and his life is turned upside down with a single phone call.

You will be pulling for DK to overcome his astronomic oobstacles and you will not be able to put down this, action infused page-turning drama/horror story.