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Post by Dr Strange on Mar 7, 2022 0:14:03 GMT
First published in hardback in 2004 by PS Publishing Ltd., this paperback edition published in 2008 by Virgin Books Ltd.  Blurb: Few believed Professor Coldwell was in touch with an unseen world - that he could commune with spirits. But in Scotland's oldest university town something has passed from darkness into light. And now the young are being haunted by night terrors. And those who are visited disappear.
This is not a place for outsiders, especially at night. So what chance do a rootless musician and burnt-out explorer have of surviving their entanglement with an ageless supernatural evil and the ruthless cult that worships it?
This chilling occult thriller is both a homage to the great age of British ghost stories and a pacy modern tale of diabolism and witchcraft. I must have read this not very long after the paperback came out - I seem to remember buying it in the Virgin Records shop in Aberdeen. The cover is Jamesian, and so is the story. I am about half-way through, and here is a brief summary of what has happened so far - Two members of Birmingham heavy metal band Sister Morphine arrive in St Andrews - Dante (lyricist/vocalist) and Tom (lead guitar) have been close friends since childhood, though their relationship has recently been strained by the way that Tom (who is something of a Lothario) treated a girl that Dante was secretly in love with. Dante has been a huge fan of Eliot Caldwell's cult book Banquet For The Damned (which chronicles Coldwell's dabblings in occultism and hallucinogenic drug use as a young man in the 1960s) for many years, and he wants the band's second ("difficult") album to be a concept album based on the book. After just a few letters exchanged with Coldwell (now a member of staff in the School of Divinity at St Andrews, and who apparently doesn't do phone calls or email), Dante was surprised but excited to be asked to come up to St Andrews to work as a "research assistant" on his planned second book. Tom tags along, mainly with a view to picking up some chicks. They aren't in St Andrews long before it becomes obvious that something decidedly weird is going on in the town - human body parts washed up on the beach, students going missing, and strange animal-like noises being heard at night. Dante's meetings with Coldwell are both disturbing and something of a let-down - Coldwell seems decrepit, ill, incoherent, and reluctant to provide Dante with any real idea of what he is supposed to be doing there, other than giving him a pile of musty old academic tomes to read. Then Coldwell insists that Dante meets the mysterious and (literally) intoxicating Beth, whose exact relationship with Coldwell is unclear. Meanwhile, alcoholic American anthropologist Hart Miller is visiting the university to investigate an apparent outbreak of "night terrors" in students - a phenomenon he has studied in various "primitive" cultures across the world, and which he has come to believe is genuinely supernatural. |
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