Showing results for "Chris" in Magical Realism

‘Beautiful, amazing, mesmerising’ ALAN CUMMING A MISSING PERSON MYSTERY LIKE NO OTHER I am not gone. Mum is not gone. We are here. We are hidden. A father who is trying to rescue his lost wife. Their child, desperately searching the wild forests and dangerous mountains of the Scottish...

The kid called Chatter has an affliction. Perhaps it is a gift. He attracts dying jackrabbits. Orphaned by parents whose names he never knew, he was worshiped and savaged in the institutions that raised him. Pushed out by his peers, trailed by the dying, the kid called Chatter fled. In an isolated river valley on the western frontier, as the Great Depression drags on, the jackrabbits are undeterred and the kid called Chatter is trapped inside the choice to survive. Moonshiner Ruddy Lou offers him a future as a messianic faith healer, as long as he never asks questions or exposes the con.

A series of strange events accompany the delivery of an unusual wooden box to the bookish professor who lives on the hill, while down by the sleepy harbor, a dusty convoy of huge earth-moving machines roll into town. Soon afterwards, an expensive-looking yacht arrives, skippered by an enigmatic sea captain. The mysterious mute captain, her nose permanently buried in an old notebook, is clearly seeking something. Meanwhile, the professor’s interest is piqued by an unusually attentive congregation of praying mantises in his back yard.

Med school dropout Harlan Winter returns to his impoverished West Virginia hometown, where the law is scarce, arsonists are turning everything to ash, and his family’s turbulent history lingers. All he wants is to keep the peace in a community cowering from the Lighthouse, a local cult preying on people’s fears. Harlan’s own fears, too, when he’s hired to play detective and find a young couple gone missing.

On a streetcar, on Christmas Day, 1950, clutching the chrome rail in front of him, Martin Radey looks at the woman seated beside him, a stranger, and utters his last words: "I can't breathe." Like millions, billions before him, it is his turn to die. But death is not what he expected. The journey has only begun. From 1880 to 1950, time happens to the world around him, not to memory, because memory, he discovers, is beyond time, traveling forward with him, shaping the earth, the sky, the heart.

Harlan Winter has returned to his corner of Appalachia, where his fiery history with a depraved cult has made him a legend. All Harlan wants is to run his occult bookshop and get on with his life—if only his unsettling visions would let him. But when a fellow devotee of the dark arts moves to Coopersville and Harlan’s coveted grimoire is stolen, he’s pulled into a world deadlier than the one that already scarred his soul.