While "communing with spirits," Schell sees an image of a young girl in a pane of glass, silently entreating the con man for help. Though well aware that his otherworldly "powers" are a sham, Schell inexplicably offers his services to help find the lost child -- drawing Diego along with him into a tangled maze of deadly secrets and terrible experimentation.
At once a hypnotically compelling mystery and a stunningly evocative portrait of Depression-era New York, The Girl in the Glass is a masterly literary adventure from a writer of exemplary vision and skill.
]]>Appointing themselves ad hoc investigators, the brothers set out to aid the police—while their little sister, Mary, smokes cigarettes, speaks in other voices, inhabits alternate personas . . . and, unbeknownst to her older siblings, moves around the inanimate residents of Botch Town. But ensuing events add a shadowy cast to the boys' night games: disappearances, deaths, and spectral sightings capped off by the arrival of a sinister man in a long white car trawling the neighborhood after dark. Strangest of all is the inescapable fact that every one of these troubling occurrences seems to correspond directly to the changes little Mary has made to the miniature town in the basement.
Not since Ray Bradbury's classic Dandelion Wine has a novel so richly evoked the dark magic of small-town boyhood. At once a hypnotically compelling mystery, a masterful re-creation of a unique time and place, a celebration of youth, and a poignant and disquieting portrait of home and family—all balancing on a razor's edge separating reality from the unsettlingly remarkable—The Shadow Year is a monumental new work from one of contemporary fiction's most fearless and inventive artists.
]]>Cley was once the greatest practitioner of the Physiognomy, a dangerous pseudoscience invented by the twisted tyrant Drachton Below. Since the fall of Below's Well-Built City, Cley has dedicated himself to healing. But when his new people fall into a deadly sleep from which he cannot wake them, he ventures to the ruins of the Well-Built City for the cure. He discovers Below is still alive--but the antidote is lost and Below is asleep, victim to the disease he created. Cley must strike a pact with Below's demon to enter Below's mind in search of the antidote's formula. But even if he survives the demon, Cley may not survive the very real dangers of Below's vast, intricate, and treacherous memory palace--or the disintegration of the dying madman's mind. --Cynthia Ward
]]>Cley wanders both literally and figuratively in the wilderness as he follows the woman he hideously harmed into the Beyond, a mysterious, bizarre, and frightening frontier between worlds. The demon Misrix uses the Physiognomist's powerful drug, sheer beauty, to watch his friend's journey, even as he pursues his own equally dangerous quest, the search for his humanity. --Cynthia Ward
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