My
Brother’s Keeper, by Tim Powers (Sept. 5, 2023)
This
is a ghost story. It is a story about werewolves, and things that go bump in
the night. It is a story of an ill-fated land, the pathless moors of Northern
England so well chronicled in Wuthering Heights. And it
is the story of a real family whose destiny it is to deal with this darkly
glamorous and dangerous world.
When young Emily Brontë helps a wounded man she finds at the foot of an ancient
pagan shrine in the remote Yorkshire moors, her life becomes contentiously
entwined with his. He is Alcuin Curzon, embittered member of a sect working to
eradicate the resurgent plague of lycanthropy in Europe and northern England.
But Emily’s father, curate of the Haworth village church, is responsible for
having unwittingly brought a demonic werewolf god to Yorkshire forty years
ago—and it is taking possession of Emily’s beloved but foolish and dissolute
brother. Curzon must regard Emily’s family as a dire threat.
In spite of being at deadly odds, Emily and Curzon find themselves thrown
together in fighting werewolves, confronting pagan gods, even saving each other
from the lures of moorland demons. And in a final battle that sweeps from the
haunted village of Haworth to a monstrous shrine far out on the moors, the two
of them must be reluctant allies against an ancient power that seems likely to
take their souls as well as their lives. – Amazon.
I
got my copy yesterday (Sept. 6) two days earlier than expected. I have been
slowly letting myself ease into the book, hoping to make it last at least a
good while, and not to simply gobble it down all at once. This is not easy
because the story seems to hit the ground running. I suppose Powers knows what
his readers expect by now and needs less ‘wind up.’ But I shall have to wait
until I finish it, of course, to give a complete opinion.
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