Back in the present, a mysterious woman is desperate to retrieve her family’s lost artifact before its evil can be released into the world. The altar, black basalt stone with unusual carvings, is the creation of a powerful magician who has an equally powerful adversary. Lewis and Horace Walpole with its damp subterranean crypts, dripping vaulted ceilings, and creaking iron gates. The novel’s historical section, brief but effective, references M.G. Even the setting feels like something out of an Ira Levin story, evoking the simple pleasures of a bygone New York: jaunts through the Strand bookstore and Met museum, martini-fueled power lunches, sparkling cocktail parties at tony townhouses. I was instantly reminded‑gleefully so‑of In the Mouth of Madness, Trilogy of Terror, and Rosemary’s Baby. Flush with his second-act success, Tyson becomes a willing vehicle for an ancient, unspeakable evil.įracassi’s Gothic is awash in familiar horror tropes: the Faustian bargain, the cursed object with a dark history. Of course it does, but as in all good horror fiction, there is a heavy price to pay. This piece of Gothic artwork, an 18th-century occult altarpiece, may give him the inspiration he needs. In fact, she surprises him with a gift for his 59th birthday: a valuable antique to replace his worn-out writing desk. So are long-suffering women who only want to help.Įnter his live-in girlfriend Sarah, a woman of taste with money of her own, whom Tyson worries will any day now see him for the fraud he is. Pushing sixty, bordering on alcoholism and debt, how long can Tyson hang on to the comfortable life his fading talent secured for him? Desperate men are dangerous in fiction. Why can’t he produce the hits like he used to? Tyson promises a rewrite but knows he doesn’t have it in him.
Tyson Parks, a washed-up horror writer huffing the last fumes of his former successes, endures a humiliating meeting with his editor.
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