Don’t ask me why, but I thought I had a Sunday Surprise scheduled for yesterday, but I’m not letting a week go by without one. So I’m doing it today. Here’s another bunch of novels that I’ve come across…
Neverland by Douglas Clegg
For years, the Jackson family has vacationed at Rowena Wandigaux Lee’s old Victorian house on Gull Island, a place of superstition and legend off the southern coast of the U.S. One particular summer, young Beau follows his cousin Sumter into a hidden shack in the woods—and christens this new clubhouse “Neverland.”
Neverland has a secret history, unknown to the children…
The rundown shack in the woods is the key to an age-old mystery, a place forbidden to all. But Sumter and his cousins gather in its dusty shadows to escape the tensions at their grandmother’s house. Neverland becomes the place where children begin to worship a creature of shadows, which Sumter calls “Lucy.”
All gods demand sacrifice…
It begins with small sacrifices, little games, strange imaginings. While Sumter’s games spiral out of control, twisting from the mysterious to the macabre, a nightmarish presence rises among the straggly trees beyond the bluffs overlooking the sea.
And when Neverland itself is threatened with destruction, the children’s games take on a horrifying reality—and Gull Island becomes a place of unrelenting terror.
Vintage Soul by David Niall Wilson
The first in a series of paranormal vampire mysteries begins with the abduction of a sexpot vampire with “the smooth, flawless skin of a seventeen-year old,” and a dress that “rippled with every shift of her well-muscled form.” Several more impossible crimes follow, complete with near-endless descriptions of effortlessly subverted security hurdles. Detective DeChance is brought in by the vampires’ council of elders to find the perpetrator. Tall, dark and handsome, DeChance is also an accomplished wizard whose spells protect him from vampires, and his girlfriend (also tall and beautiful) is an expert in the magic of crystals. As the kidnapper taunts his victim with details of his plot (in a voice “empty of mirth but dripping with contempt”), the flat plot spins out predictably with mystical smoke and plenty of explosions, but little real craft. – Publishers Weekly
The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane by Katherine Howe
A spellbinding, beautifully written novel that moves between contemporary times and one of the most fascinating and disturbing periods in American history — the Salem witch trials.
Harvard graduate student Connie Goodwin needs to spend her summer doing research for her doctoral dissertation. But when her mother asks her to handle the sale of Connie’s grandmother’s abandoned home near Salem, she can’t refuse. As she is drawn deeper into the mysteries of the family house, Connie discovers an ancient key secreted within a seventeenth-century Bible. The key contains a yellowing fragment of parchment with a name written upon it: Deliverance Dane. This discovery launches Connie on a quest to find out who this woman was, and to unearth a rare colonial artifact of singular power: a physick book, its pages a secret repository for lost knowledge of herbs and other, stranger things.
As the pieces of Deliverance’s harrowing story begin to fall into place, Connie is haunted by visions of the long-ago witch trials, and begins to fear that she is more tied to Salem’s dark past then she could have ever imagined.
Written with astonishing conviction and grace, The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane travels seamlessly between the trials in the 1690s, and a modern woman’s story of mystery, intrigue, and revelation.
I am a huge fan of Douglas Clegg’s work. Have been for ages now. He’s an excellent author.