The Haunting of Drumroe

The Haunting of Drumroe
Claudette Nicolle | Fawcett Gold Medal | 141 pages | 1971

Eileen Donegan returns to Ireland and her ancestral family home after receiving a cryptic letter of help from her aunt Agnes, Lady Donegon of Drumroe. Driving to the remote estate, Eileen is nearly killed by a tree falling across the road, sending her rental car plunging into a lake. Finally arriving at the great house, she is alarmed to discover that her aunt has gone missing, and that none of the household staff can explain her absence. 

A familiar gothic thriller template is further established with the introduction of two competing love interests for Eileen, the dark-haired solicitor Rory Muldoon and the gray-eyed local historian Colin Riorden. A bit of unnecessary backstory relating to Eileen’s philandering ex-husband lays the groundwork for her shifting affections between the two men, which is expressed mostly through some feverish hand holding and a few chaste kisses.

Claudette Nicolle is a pseudonym for John Messman, who wrote a number of these genre staples, almost universally featuring covers depicting women in nightgowns running away from castles. Hints of this underlying male authorship abound by the fascination with Eileen’s sleeping in the nude, and the repeated references to her firm and ample breasts.

Although there are no actual hauntings in The Haunting of Drumroe, supernatural elements emerge through Eileen’s psychic abilities. Reportedly descended from an infamous local witch, Eileen has received psychic impressions of family tragedies at various periods throughout her life, some at great distance. Now, her psychic impressions tell her that aunt Agnes is dead, although the details are maddeningly scarce. 

Beyond simply “knowing” that her aunt is dead, Eileen’s psychic talents are mostly underutilized and not particularly relevant in solving the mystery. Eileen is even less gifted as a traditional detective, since she seems bluntly oblivious to the fairly overt clues leading to the person responsible for her aunt’s disappearance, the attempts on her own life, and a laundry list of other mysterious deaths in the family.

The Irish setting is modestly rendered, but appealing: the small villages, the rolling hills, the chilly lough, the lonely cemetery, and—of course—the weird pagan rituals in the woods at night. The political violence in Northern Ireland is introduced as a possible explanation for an attack on Eileen, but it does feel slightly out of place in an otherwise standard genre work that could have easily been set in the nineteenth century.

A perfectly serviceable, if altogether unmemorable, gothic thriller.

The Phantom of the Opera

The Phantom of the Opera
Gaston Leroux | Warner Books | 1986 (first published 1909) | 264 pages

With Andrew Lloyd Webber’s pop-cultural juggernaut retiring from Broadway, now is perhaps a good time to return to the Paris Opera House and reevaluate Gaston Leroux’s original The Phantom of the Opera.

The book unfolds almost as a true-crime account, with the unnamed narrator reflecting back from some distance of years upon the course of the strange events, disappearances, and unexplained deaths that confirm his ultimate conclusion:

“The Opera ghost really existed.”

The atmosphere of fear is established at once, as a group of ballet dancers relate the various sightings of the “Opera ghost” that sometimes appears within the labyrinthine Palais Garnier. After one such encounter, stagehand Joseph Buquet was discovered hanged to death, although the rope itself was not found. The existence of the ghost, however, cannot be dismissed as simple hearsay among the performers. A change in stewardship of the Opera leads the outgoing directors, Debienne and Poligny, to confirm the existence of the ghost to their replacements and to pass along his written list of demands, hand lettered in blood-red ink.

Initially dismissing the ghost as a practical joke, the new directors, Moncharmin and Richard, slowly come to realize the deadly seriousness of the missives received in the shaky block lettering of the phantom’s hand. Their attempts to ignore or thwart the ghost’s instructions lead to several genuinely suspenseful moments, culminating in a decidedly memorable performance of Faust and a deadly falling chandelier.

The Palais Garnier provides a fantastic background, the theater’s opulent private boxes, warren of backstage rooms, and multiple mezzanine levels offering its shadowy resident the ability to travel in secret and set in motion his elaborate plans. The phantom’s disembodied voice is eerily present, whether from behind a dressing room mirror or from an empty seat inside a private-viewing box. The locations become even more fantastic at greater depth beneath the Palais Garnier, culminating in the secret lair on the far shore of the underground lake, its mirror-lined torture room providing a deadly trap for intruders.

Considering it features a purported ghost, the story mainly eschews any specifically supernatural elements. However, a greater fantastical lore beyond the phantom is implied through several references to other denizens existing under the Opera House, such as the flame-headed rat catcher and the mysterious siren of the lake, without explicitly detailing their nature. The eventual need to explain all in mortal terms causes the book to fall somewhat in its extended epilogue, which provides unnecessary explanations of every seemingly impossible action perpetrated by the ghost, along with some improbable personal histories.

The book is inarguably a classic on many levels. Undoubtedly deriving from the original serial nature of the work, the action constantly moves the story forward at a brisk pace. The evocative locations raise the Palais Garnier to a fully realized character in its own right. However, it’s the latent romantic triangle that fully occupies the story’s heart and tragically informs the entire work.

Young understudy Christine Daaé delivers a star performance when she steps in to replace the lead soprano, who has suddenly fallen ill. However, her success comes with a price, namely the growing obsession of the man she refers to as the Angel of Music. Christine knows this secret music tutor as Erik, but he is also–of course–the phantom of the Opera. When her childhood crush, Vicomte Raoul de Chagny, visits her dressing room after the performance, the ensuing jealous rivalry sets into motion a fatal series of events.

Raoul proves to be an earnest, somewhat bland, and frequently ineffectual romantic hero. After Christine’s disappearance, he relies heavily upon the Persian, a ubiquitous character with a mysterious personal history, to pursue Erik through the various underground realms. Christine’s continued loyalty and empathy toward the tortured genius Erik, even after his unmasking, is not entirely unthinkable, skull face and dangerously violent personality notwithstanding. She may be romantically drawn to Raoul, but she is unable to break the profound musical bond she shares with Erik, even though she is simultaneously repulsed by his physical appearance. Undoubtedly evil, but Erik is also something of a Renaissance man: unmatched vocalist, genius composer, cunning assassin, master architect, and gifted…ventriloquist?

This universally acknowledged classic is, unsurprisingly, well worth a revisit–even without the benefit of the soundtrack album.

The Mystery of the Yellow Room

The Mystery of the Yellow Room
Gaston Leroux | Dover | 1977 (first published 1907) | 188 pages

The Mystery of the Yellow Room, an early example of a “locked-door” mystery by the author of The Phantom of the Opera, introduces the young reporter and amateur detective, Joseph Rouletabille, whose ingenious acts of deduction are featured in a series of novels and short stories.

Rouletabille arrives at the Château du Glandier to investigate an attack against Mathilde Stangerson, the daughter and scientific associate of a notable professor who conducts his work in a laboratory housed in a pavilion on the grounds of his estate. Professor Stangerson’s late-night experiments were interrupted by a loud gunshot and Matilde’s scream of “Murder!” from her adjacent bedroom. Breaking down the locked door, the professor and his elderly servant discover the incapacitated Mathilde, suffering from a life-threatening blow to the head. Beyond a few muddy boot prints and a bloody handprint on the wall, there is no sign of an intruder and no obvious means of escape.

Rouletabille possesses an outsized reputation for solving crimes considering his tender age of only eighteen years, and a correspondingly large ego and reservoir of self-confidence. The case to solve the mystery is framed as a battle of wills between young Rouletabille and Frédéric Larsan, an esteemed police detective assigned to the case, who much to Rouletabille’s consternation, focuses exclusively on Mathilde’s fiance, Robert Darzac, as a prime suspect.

The novel is told mostly from the point of view of Jean Sainclair, a young lawyer and professional acquaintance of Rouletabille, although some facts of the case are recounted through newspaper articles. The crime details are repeatedly described as sensational in these press sections, but the flat reporting style actually works to diminish their emotional impact. Later, the perspective shifts briefly to Rouletabille’s own journal entries for an account of a second attack against Mathilde, but the change in viewpoint isn’t particularly critical or insightful. The few transitions in point-of-view don’t necessarily add anything, nor do they ultimately detract from the storytelling.

After attempting to kill Mathilde with a brazen attack in her own bedchambers at the château, the suspect flees and–once again–seems to inexplicably disappear without a trace, this time vanishing virtually before the eyes of Rouletabille and several other pursuers. Perhaps it’s due to the translation from the work’s original French, but the suspect is always referred to as “the murderer” even though Mathilde survives her attacks. The murderer’s ability to ostensibly dissipate into nothingness suggests a connection to the professor’s scientific studies of “matter dissociation.”

This second attempt on Mathilde’s life is suspenseful, but hampered somewhat by the detailed descriptions of the hallway configurations, room layouts, and the various positions and movements of all the participants. Although clearly an instance of establishing “fair play” by the author, who provides an exhaustively thorough account for the readers/detectives to build their own legitimate solutions, this attention to detail does effectively slow down the momentum of what should be a naturally suspenseful series of events.

Another strange and evocative disappearance along the lines of “matter dissociation” occurs when the body of another victim, stabbed through the heart, is found in place of the suspect, who was seemingly shot to death while escaping mere steps ahead of Rouletabille.

The denouement greatly amplifies the gather-all-the-suspects mystery trope, as Rouletabille crashes Darzac’s public trial to reveal the true murderer. The resolution owes as much to Victorian melodrama as to conventional detective fiction, since the young reporter’s courtroom showboating crosses into the realm of the ridiculously theatrical. The credibility-stretching divulgence of the existence of a criminal mastermind pushes the overall tone closer to the serial crime stories of Fantômas than to the mystery genre conventions set in place by The Murders in the Rue Morgue.

Even after the leisurely final reveal, the story slowly winds down even further as Rouletabille ties up all the loose ends by providing full motivations for the remaining characters and their actions (or non-actions). A hint at an abandoned child in America points to even more melodrama ahead in the sequel, The Perfume of the Lady in Black.

The King in Yellow

The King in Yellow
Robert W. Chambers | Dover | 1970 (first published 1895) | 287 pages

The first four stories in The King in Yellow are classics of weird horror fiction, tied together by references to a fictional forbidden text that reputedly drives its readers insane. The remaining works vary in content and tone, from the horrors of war to the lives of art students in Bohemian Paris, and are arguably less essential. However, like the pasted wall covering in Charlotte Perkin Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, the pigment itself rubs off, tainting the various other stories with occasional references to the yellow streak in the sky, smear in the paint, and reflection in the eye.

Along with its horrors, the first story in the collection (The Repairer of Reputations) packs a considerable amount of speculation on the alternate history of New York into its first few pages. Set in an imagined future of 1920, it features some extremely dubious governmental policies regarding race and immigration, along with the creation of a series of state-sanctioned suicide kiosks. However, as a prognostication of the future it fails in a major way–overlooking the entirety of the first world war.

The Repairer of Reputations also introduces the metatextual The King in Yellow, a mysterious forbidden play that has been universally banned due to its readers being literally driven insane by the text. The protagonist, Hildred Castaigne, already suffers from a head injury and a brief stint in an asylum, but further slips into the territory of the unreliable narrator after his exposure to the play. The cursed work is an interesting precursor to the Necronomicon, H.P. Lovecraft’s fictional grimoire, and also the concept of the “word virus” propagated in the experimental fiction of William S. Burroughs.

Castaigne eventually descends into delusional madness, convinced that an international conspiracy will elevate him to a vaunted position similar to that of King of the World–if only his cousin wasn’t standing in his way. Due to its baroque style, foundational content, and shocking conclusion, The Repairer of Reputations is arguably the strongest piece in the collection.

The Mask details the horrors inflicted by a sculptor who dabbles in weird science, In the Court of the Dragon unleashes an evil doppelganger, and The Yellow Sign haunts with its malevolent watchman and recurring dream hearse. In the background, all these stories are nominally linked and informed by The King in Yellow, whose malignant influence casts a pall upon the various characters across all the narratives.

Individually unsettling, these four stories are able to stand alone as horror classics, but are elevated by the notion of the deeper connection to The King in Yellow. This fable of an occult text, and the corresponding idea of words themselves instilling madness, reaches out through the vintage horrors of Lovecraft into the more recent pop cultural world of Pontypool and True Detective.

Unfortunately, the rest of the collection slowly unwinds, particularly losing steam and interest over the course of the stories set among the artistic demimonde of the Latin Quarter of Paris. There are still moments of horror, however, in the details of the frontline carnage of the Franco-Prussian War represented in The Street of the First Shell, and in the stinging pathos surrounding a hungry cat in Street of the Four Winds. 

Much of the appeal of The King in Yellow is surely due to its undefined nature, which allows the imagination to run free from the constraints of specification and hint at the greater cosmic horror lurking just outside of understanding.

The Yellow Wallpaper

The Yellow Wallpaper
Charlotte Perkins Gilman | Feminist Press | 1973 (first published 1892) | 64 pages

The Yellow Wallpaper packs a considerable amount of subtext into its short page count, but also creates an exceptionally creepy atmosphere of loneliness, despair and madness. It also manages to realize these accomplishments with a story essentially reduced to a single narrator in a single, if certainly remarkable, room.

Failing to convince her physician husband that she is suffering from an actual illness, the narrator is left on her own to “rest” and recover from her perceived hysteria in the former nursery of a mansion the couple is renting for the summer. It is revealed that the narrator has recently given birth, but is unable to see her child due to her weak condition.

Discouraged to even write in her own journal, she has little to occupy her time except to contemplate the sickly color and convoluted pattern of the room’s wallpaper. Echoing and amplifying her own emotional confinement, the bed is secured to the floor, the windows are barred, the walls house strange metal rings, and the floorboards show signs of deep scratches. However, it’s the wallpaper that keep occupying her mind:

“It is the strangest yellow, that wallpaper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw – not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things.”

As the days and weeks pass, the narrator watches in increasing fascination and terror as the wallpaper color shifts and the design swirls–particularly in moonlight–eventually revealing what may be a woman’s figure struggling to escape from inside the pattern. The observation that the woman is “creeping” within the wallpaper, and may also be escaping from her imprisonment into the night, is effectively chilling.

The narrator’s isolated existence in the nursery room–subject to her husband’s decisions over her health, overt condescension, and outright dismissal of her concerns–clearly represents a critique of society’s attitudes toward women by a proto-feminist author and social activist. However, The Yellow Wallpaper cannot be reduced to a simple treatise on the social ills surrounding gender inequity, because it also completely succeeds as a weird, terrifying, and subtly disquieting horror story.

<POSSIBLE SPOILER> The ending is abrupt yet ambiguous, and remains open to some interpretation, including the possibility of suicide. The potential for self-harm is foreshadowed by earlier language describing individual wallpaper patterns as ending in “suicide” and the ominous presence of a rope in the room after all the furniture has been removed. <END SPOILER>

Although written in the late nineteenth century, the language is exceedingly modern, making an easy recommendation for readers interested in works of foundational psychological horror.

The Uninhabited House

The Uninhabited House
Mrs. J.H. (Charlotte) Riddell | Chatto & Windus | 1889 | 168 pages

Miss Blake has a problem. River Hall, the rambling house on the Thames her young niece, Helena Elmsdale, inherited from her father after his suicide, cannot seem to keep any paying tenants, leaving the pair in a perpetual state of financial jeopardy. The law firm managing the property discovers that the house has a local reputation for being haunted, driving away any prospective tenants, buyers, and even household staff. 

Harry Patterson, a clerk at the Craven law firm, takes it upon himself to move into the house in order to solve the mystery behind the flight of so many tenants, and also succeed in winning over the affections of Helena Elsmdale, to whom he has become infatuated. Told from Patterson’s perspective, easily the first third or more of the story concerns itself with the financial albatross that is River Hall, and the firm’s difficulty in managing the property. The start is slow going, as monetary concerns outweigh any ghostly encounters. In fact, the book probably breaks the record for the repeated use of the word “pecuniary” in the text.

Once Patterson finally occupies River Hall, the spooky hijinks finally begin, although unfolding at a leisurely pace. There’s a tapping at the bedroom window, and doors seemingly open and close by themselves in the night. Patterson leaves powder on the hallway floors to capture the footprints of any potential nocturnal invaders. His disbelief in the supernatural is shaken when he witnesses a ghostly specter descend the central staircase and disappear through a closed door in the landing. However, he cannot rule out a human agency behind the campaign to drive tenants away when he finds a distinctive set of footprints outside the windows, and later discovers that he is being followed in the streets of London by a strange man.

Patterson proves to be a sincere, if somewhat dull narrator, who is occasionally upstaged by the antics of Miss Blake. Her commoner’s Irish diction and demeanor border on comic relief, all bluster and defiance before turning around to ask for the loan of a few pounds.

Charlotte Riddell’s Victorian ghost story actually blends elements from a few different genres, but never rises to a particularly thrilling level of engagement. The mystery of Richard Elsmdale’s suicide plays along with the haunted house and suspense elements, and underlying all is the latent romance between Patterson and Helena. Is the house haunted? Are people scaring the tenants away? Did Mr. Elmsdale really coming suicide? Are the two crazy kids in love ever going to get together? Perhaps not quite living up to classic status, but an appealing enough mix that is short enough to never outstay its welcome.

The ending is oddly flat, however, simultaneously confirming two separate elements behind the mystery, while leaving a critical resolution undeveloped–yet providing singular clarity relating to the inevitable nuptials.

The House on the Brink

The House on the Brink
John Gordon | Puffin Books | 1972 | 192 pages

Two teenagers investigate a supernatural mystery after something malevolent seemingly pulls itself free of the mud of the marshy Fenlands in East Anglia. Written primarily for a teen audience, the book does suggest a hypothetical Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew mashup–in which Frank and Nancy also develop a budding romance–-that could easily have been titled The Case of the Evil Log.

Leaving a night class held in the isolated home of a lonely widow, Mrs. Knowles, teen Dick Dodds stumbles across a strange trail in the mud of the marsh. However, Dick discovers he is somehow able to continue following the trail over dry land. He experiences a bizarre, psychic-like sensation in the air around him, pointing him forward towards the destination of the strange entity that he assumes originated from the muck.

While searching the countryside, Dick meets Helen Johnson, a young neighbor who also is able to sense the psychic trail. Although Dick becomes fixated on a blackened stump that casts an inexplicably malevolent pall, Helen claims to have actually seen a frightening figure–without arms and legs–wriggling in the mud in the marsh beyond her house. 

An old woman who has the power of water divination informs the pair of their latent talents in a scene marginally prefiguring Dick Hallorann’s “Not things that anyone can notice, but things that only people with shine can see” speech to Danny Torrance in The Shining (only about dowsing). As the pair investigate the mysteries of the marsh, their encounters with the supernatural sometimes seem silly, but are frequently spooky and take advantage of the isolated wilderness of the surrounding landscape.

Their investigations prove as impulsive as Dick himself, bouncing around between the old water dowser, Mrs. Knowles, and her lawyer friend, Tom Miller, whose interest in the local legend of King John’s lost treasure further informs the story. Dick frequently acts like a heel, unfortunately subject to uncontrolled impulses of rash bravado, intermittently interrupted with chaste kisses with Helen. He is also annoyingly prone to blunt, rhetorical ejaculations that instill much eye-rolling; “I am the key in the lock of the world!”

Still, the appeal of a pair of teen amateur detectives cycling around the Fenlands in an adventure that involves lost treasure is undeniable, even if the Big Bad of the story initially appears to be “a black, smooth, round, bald-headed old post.”

The Listening House

The Listening House
Mabel Seeley | Doubleday | 1938 | 296 pages

“You let me see you talking, just talking, to that guy, and I’ll take your pants down and spank you with a table leg.”

After losing her copywriting job because of a major proofreading error, Gwynne Dacres moves into a slightly down-at-heel boarding house to stretch her modest savings. Although described as “respectable” by the house’s landlady, Harriet Garr, 593 Trent Street is perched on a steep incline overlooking a seedy neighborhood, and produces a somewhat disquieting effect upon Gwynne. Her anxiety proves justified, however, when she discovers the body of a murdered man that has been dumped over the railing behind the house.

The dead man is found to have ties to organized crime, but the police ultimately fail to connect him to any of the tenants. Meanwhile, Mrs. Garr appears nervous, suspecting someone in the house of searching through her possessions. Several days after purportedly leaving town on a trip to Chicago, Mrs. Garr’s body is discovered in the locked basement kitchen–the cause of death obfuscated by the gnawings of her hungry pet cats!

The various details may be grisly, but the general tone is lightened by Gwynne’s unflagging determination and self-confidence. Although met with personal setbacks and much condescension from various authority figures, she remains steadfast in her resolution that Mrs. Garr was murdered. Her banter with Hodge Kistler, fellow tenant and playboy heel/romantic interest, evokes the kind of back-and-forth patois found in other sparkling Golden Age mysteries, although not as fully successful here. Even the grumpy Lieutenant Strom (whom Gwynne suspects is married) eventually wants to take her out to dinner and a movie.

Gwynne is also remarkably resilient. She is almost strangled, attacked with ether, struck with a hammer, and tumbles down a flight of stairs, but never loses her verve and good humor. She plays the role of amateur detective well, searching through the private lives of the motley group of tenants who inhabit the boarding house. The case becomes more complicated than it initially appeared, when Mrs. Garr and several of the tenants are revealed to be connected to a tragic suicide that occurred nearly twenty years before.

Gwynne describes the house as quiet, yet seemingly listening to all activity, and this atmosphere of eerie suspense adds much of the appeal of the story. Although the murderous events take some time in getting going, the mood established through the location and its cast of dubious characters is thick with menace beyond Gwynne’s door–wedged shut with a kitchen chair under the knobs.

Add the prospect of a hidden treasure to the whodunnit, and The Listening House becomes an enjoyable, if not particularly weighty, romp.

Elric of Melniboné

Elric of Melniboné
Michael Moorcock | DAW | 1976 | 160 pages

Elric may be the nominal emperor of the dying kingdom of Melniboné, but with his slight build, long white hair, and gloomy disposition fueled by life-sustaining drugs, his role as a proto-Goth kid is cemented as much as that of Eternal Champion.

“It is the colour of a bleached skull, his flesh; and the long hair which flows below his shoulders is milk-white. From the tapering, beautiful head stare two slanting eyes, crimson and moody, and from the loose sleeves of his yellow gown emerge two slender hands, also the colour of bone.”

Elric certainly lacks the character typically associated with the notion of what composes a standard-bearer of the Eternal Champion. Although he lacks interest in the traditional rites of rule in Imrryr, capital city of Melniboné, he presides over a system that is imbued with slavery and casual torture.

Melniboné’s position as a fading power among a host of rival kingdoms is established, but any extensive world building easily takes a backseat to sword-and-sorcery action from the outset. A failed attempt to usurp the throne by Elric’s power hungry cousin Yyrkoon drives the indolent emperor to action. Drawing assistance from the elemental powers of the earth, Elric gives chase to Yyrkoon to prevent him from acquiring the twin mythical swords, Mournblade and Stormbringer, and thus assuming the power to take over the kingdom and the entire world. 

The action is brisk. Opening with a sea battle in the watery maze surrounding Melniboné’s harbor, the narrative quickly follows Elric as he pursues Yyrkoon in a magical ship that travels over both land and sea. Elric communes with the higher gods of chaos, leads an attack against a city protected by a magical mirror, travels into another plane of existence, and engages Yyrkoon in a final battle equipped with the magical blades.

Contrary to most fantasy epics, the cast of characters here is as reduced as the descriptions of the world. Elric and Yyrkoon are at the central conflict, fighting for the kingdom as well as for the romantic attention of Yyrkoon’s sister Cyrmoril–who spends much of the book under the thrall of a sleep spell. The crimson archer Rackhir befriends Elric in his travels, and accompanies him on his quest. It’s probably fortunate that the ironically named Dr. Jest has a limited appearance, as the torturer’s early work on the captured spies of Imrryr delivers a grisly gut punch while the detached Elric watches on with indifference.

Although Melnibone is known as the Dragon Isle, the dragon master Dyvim Tvar only plays a small support role, with the dragons themselves always seeming to be sleeping following another off-page outing.

However, the small cast of characters is not at all limiting, but instead helps focus the action. Eschewing lengthy back stories or floods of descriptive text, Elric of Melniboné delivers a series foundation without bogging down in the trappings of ornate or overly excessive prose.

Recommended audio pairing: The Cure, Disintegration.

Night Has a Thousand Eyes

Night Has a Thousand Eyes
Cornell Woolrich | Ballantine | 1983 (first published 1945) | 304 pages

A dark prophecy of death sends a man and his daughter into a downward spiral of despair in this supernaturally-tinged noir from the famed author of Rear Window.

While strolling along the riverside late one night, off-duty detective Tom Shawn comes across a distraught young woman standing upon the raised embankment, seemingly in contemplation of jumping to her death. Talking her down from the ledge, Shawn escorts her to a nearby diner, where she confides her fatalistic story of a foretold death.

The book is split roughly into thematic halves, with the first recounting the series of successful prognostications leading Jean Reid and her father, Harlan, to become convinced of the veracity of a psychic’s visions of the future. The predictions culminate in a very precise foretelling of Harlan’s death three days hence at midnight.

Even the means of death, simply described by the psychic as death by lion, becomes somehow less absurd when a pair of lions escapes from a local traveling sideshow. 

The second half of the book is less satisfying, describing Shawn’s attempts at stopping the prophecy and saving Harlan’s life. Even considering that Shawn is calling in a personal favor from his superior on the police force, the sheer number of officers pulled into an extensive investigation and protection operation—based on a nominal threat described in a psychic vision—is almost as comical as the purported means of death.

Harlan’s rapid descent from self-confident businessman to sniveling coward in the light of the fatal prediction also deflates much of the interest in seeing Shawn triumph in saving his life. By the time a wasted Harlan begs not to be left alone while watching the clock tick down to midnight, many readers will probably wish that Shawn would drag the defeated wretch down to the zoo and toss him headfirst in the lion’s den himself.

The final dinner party, characterized by Shawn and Jean’s forced cheerfulness in order to distract Harlan’s broodings, goes on much too long, with several instances of conversational near-blunders referencing time or tomorrow. Even playing records isn’t safe, with unexpected lyrics mentioning destiny threatened to send Harlan deeper into a fully self-absorbed despair. Intended as a suspenseful, against-the-clock countdown, the scene just drags along, not helped by the latent romantic undercurrent of Shawn and Jean’s banter.

However, the overall mood is effectively dark, with a fatalistic, downbeat atmosphere for characters to squirm around inside while fighting against their destinies. Although the conclusion casts the nature of the predictions themselves in an ambiguous light, the inevitable outcome clearly suggests the futility of struggling against one’s own fate.

***

SPOILER ALERT: Fraud or not, the psychic was—strictly speaking—not wrong about the lion!