The Mills of the
Gods Hardcover – December 2, 2025
by Tim
Powers (Author)
PARIS, 1925 –
HARRY NOLAN is an expatriate American, making a meager living as an illustrator
for a low-paying magazine, but his life is upended when he is assigned to
illustrate an anonymous article about the death of a god—for a centuries-old
French brotherhood, the Sauteurs, are determined to suppress
the story the article tells. The Sauteurs have burned the
magazine’s office and killed the editor, and Nolan has the only surviving copy
of the article. The author turns out to be a local writer named ERNEST
HEMINGWAY, who—at first—tries to distance himself from the article and its
lethal consequences.
VIVI CHASTAIN is a rootless 19-year-old orphan who sustains herself by betting
on horse races—aided by the spirit of the man she was in a previous life. But
now that old identity is crowding her consciousness, threatening to push her
own precarious identity into oblivion. It was her alcoholic occasional
“stepfather” who told Hemingway the story about killing a god, and the Sauteurs are
now aware of the story—and of her.
The SAUTEURS maintain their identities past death through controlled
reincarnation—when members die and are reborn, the brotherhood finds their
newborn incarnations, kidnaps them, and raises them in special nurseries, where
they can fully resume their previous lives. Vivi escaped from one of these
nurseries when she was six years old, and so her previous identity has not yet
consummated his possession of her. The Sauteurs want that consummation to
happen—soon.
GERTRUDE STEIN is the hub of literary and artistic Paris, and knows many of the
city’s supernatural secrets. She has written a book which appears to be
nonsense but which can be used to deflect the kind of psychic assault that
threatens Vivi, and she becomes a Merlin-like mentor to Vivi and Nolan—
—who find themselves reluctantly thrown together as hunted fugitives. Their
struggles to evade the murderous Sauteurs and free Vivi from
her increasingly intrusive previous self lead the pair to a mysterious hermit
who lives in the towers of Notre Dame cathedral, and the haunted catacombs
under Paris, and a confrontation with the Roman goddess Cybele in an other-worldly
temple on an island in the Seine. In pursuit of a secret painting by PABLO
PICASSO, they learn that the god whose death the Hemingway manuscript describes
is Moloch, the child-devouring Phoenician god mentioned in the Bible—and that
the Sauteurs make sacrifices to Moloch to maintain their
reincarnations.
From the narrow streets and rooftops of post-war Paris to, finally, a
supernatural battle between gods in a remote village in Spain, Nolan and Vivi
contend with forces natural and supernatural, enemies living and dead , and
ultimately find themselves pitted against the god Moloch himself—at peril of
their eternal souls.
The Mills of the Gods is a harrowing supernatural adventure, full
of color, drama, and romance, as only Tim Powers could tell it. 400 pages. - Amazon.
I've been wondering when I'd see another new Tim Powers book. I was able to catch up with missed Powers publications between new novels for a while, but for the past few months I pretty much had everything, at least anything within my pay grade (I can't spend $200 on an ancient four page give-away pamphlet) and was starting to faunch at the bit. Knowing that I have a new Powers book to look forward to gives me an added interest in the future, another lure to keep me going, as it were. That it takes place within the milieu of the Lost Generation in Paris gives it added interest, as Hemingway was my brother Mike's particular literary mentor, and I therefore know a little bit about it. And him. Powers's explorations of the strange bindings within historical circles inform much of his work, be it pirates or Romantic poets or spy rings. I sometimes wonder why he doesn't 'explore' the Inklings, but perhaps he sees that as low-hanging fruit (several authors have made fictional adventures about them already) or maybe he doesn't want to poach on fellow fantasists and Christians. Although if he did write such a book I am sure it would be amazing and streets beyond anything that's been produced yet.
Update!
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