Gravelight

Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Gravelight is one of those modern occult fantasies where the small town is not merely small, the ruined building is not merely ruined, and anyone attempting to recover quietly from personal disaster has clearly chosen the wrong postal district. Morton’s Fork, West Virginia, has the sort of name that already sounds like a warning, and it behaves accordingly: mountains, secrets, old blood, psychic pressure, local suspicion and a ruined sanitarium looming over everything like architecture with unresolved emotional issues.

Into this cheerful arrangement comes Wycherly Musgrave, a rich, drunken, guilt-ridden ne’er-do-well who is trying to outrun the possibility that he may have killed a young woman in a blackout. This is not, traditionally, the best psychological state in which to arrive near a vortex of occult nastiness, but fiction has never been built on people making sensible holiday choices. He crashes, survives, dries out badly, and finds himself stranded in the sort of place where a man’s inner darkness may receive outside assistance.

Then there is Sinah Dellon, world-famous actress, mind-reader, glamour machine and woman with a missing past. She left Morton’s Fork as an infant and returns looking for answers, which is always dangerous in books because answers rarely sit quietly in filing cabinets. Sinah can read minds and project exactly what people want to see, a talent that sounds useful until one realises it is also a fine way to mislay oneself. Fame has already turned her into a public illusion; the supernatural merely adds local management.

Above them all broods the ruined sanitarium, which naturally is not just an abandoned building but a psychic bad-news factory. Dark forces, ancestral claims, possession, old magic and dangerous gates begin gathering around the characters with the patient enthusiasm of things that have waited a long time for fresh idiots. Occult investigator Truth Jourdemayne is drawn into the mess, because when there is a gate to the sidhe, a dead black magician, a town full of tensions and several vulnerable people ripe for spiritual hijacking, apparently someone has to bring a notebook and try to stop the metaphysical plumbing from exploding.

The irony of Gravelight is that everyone seems to be searching for identity, healing or truth, and the universe keeps replying with possession, psychic assault and ancestral interference. One might hope that confronting the past would be therapeutic. In Morton’s Fork it is more like opening a cupboard and finding the past has teeth, relatives, and a working knowledge of ritual magic.

This is gothic fantasy with a modern coat on: psychic powers, old family shadows, dangerous desire, hidden ancestry, spiritual warfare, ruined buildings, wounded people and the uneasy feeling that some places remember far too much. It is for readers who like their supernatural fiction moody, layered, faintly melodramatic and full of people discovering that the past is not dead, not resting, and probably not paying rent.

Near Fine copy, as sold by Crappy Old Books. A very tidy Tor paperback, which is more than can be said for the psychic condition of nearly everyone inside. Suitable for shelves requiring witches, actors, drunk heirs, occult investigators, haunted institutions and the sort of small town where estate agents probably avoid mentioning the sidhe gate.

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