The Presence

In all his bone-chilling novels of psychological and supernatural suspense, New York Times bestselling author John Saul has proven himself a master of terror. Now prepare yourself for his most frightening novel yet--a story torn from the darkest crevices of night. Something evil has risen around you--but how can you hope to run from a terror you can't even see?BEWARE THE PRESENCE!

From School Library Journal

YA?Dr. Katharine Sundquist is hired to work on a short term archaeology project in beautiful Maui. It seems to be an ideal situation for her and her 16-year-old son, Michael, who suffers from asthma as well as the recent death of his father. She soon learns, however, that all is not well in paradise. There is a restricted wing in her high-tech laboratory where secret deliveries arrive at midnight and she discovers that deadly medical experiments are being performed. Then Michael and three friends sneak into a dive shop and help themselves to some equipment. During their night dive, they come upon a contaminated area in the ocean. Back on land, they find that their lungs cannot tolerate oxygen and they can survive only by breathing poisonous fumes. One by one, the boys are killed or simply vanish. When Michael is the only one left alive, Katharine must act quickly to save him. YAs will be engrossed in the computer search for DNA codes, the strange prehistoric or not so prehistoric bones that Katharine unearths, and a mysterious underwater geode from outer space. There is enough adventure and suspense in this thriller to capture the interest of even the most reluctant readers.?Katherine Fitch, Lake Braddock Middle School, Burke, VACopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Saul, who recently took a cue from Stephen King with the release of a serialized novel, The Blackstone Chronicles, here tells of a young archaeologist's encounter with horror in Hawaii.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

In Saul's twenty-first novel of psychological and supernatural suspense, Katherine, burned out from living in New York City and tired of seeing her asthmatic 16-year-old-son beaten up by neighborhood thugs, accepts a research position in archaeology in Hawaii, where she will be working with her former lover. She expects the lush island and the laid-back community to bring only peace and happiness. What she does not know is that a huge seed has emerged from within the crust of the earth, spewed up by violent volcanic activity beneath the ocean floor off Hawaii. The seed had arrived from a planet that had ceased to exist 15 million years ago. Soon, nonhuman life-forms begin to threaten Katherine's son's life, and the fight for survival between human and nonhuman escalates. (As Saul writes in his fascinating afterword, poisonous gases from such a seed can end life on Earth, turning Hawaii's tropical paradise into a death zone; he goes on to say that scientists have theorized that unusual life-forms living on the ocean floor near hydrothermal volcanic vents are surviving and developing with no oxygen and no sunlight, thriving in 500-degree heat on gases such as hydrogen sulfide.) The Presence just might be closer to the truth than we care to admit. At any rate, this frightening novel undoubtedly will be Saul's next best-seller. George Cohen

From Kirkus Reviews

A suspenseful thriller from the prolific and craftsmanlike Saul (The Homing, 1993, etc.) that moves like a dream through its paradisiacal Hawaiian landscape. As in his Black Lightning (1995), the lungs here are the focus of the story. In that tale, a serial killer left SS-like black lightning bolts on the pleural cavities of his victims. This time, victims' lungs suddenly become allergic to oxygen and can live only on fumes--those of ammonia, for example--that are normally poisonous. The action begins when Dr. Katharine Sundquist, an archaeologist specializing in early hominids in Africa, is hired for a three-month term to work on bones recently discovered near a vent in a volcano on Maui. Hiring her is a research lab owned by a superrich Japanese medical entrepreneur. Also on hand are a handsome fellow archaeologist who once courted the now widowed Katharine, and her son Michael, who's been overcoming asthma through physical training. When he and three Hawaiian friends go for a night dive, they come upon an underwater area contaminated by a geode from outer space. Back on land, they find that their lungs can't tolerate oxygen. How and why does the geode affect normal breathing? And what of the strange hominid-like bones Katharine patiently unearths? They look like those of early man, which is impossible, since Maui didn't exist when the first humans evolved. Are the bones somehow tied to the geode? Then it turns out that an astronomer in a Maui observatory has been studying a peculiar star some 15 million years old that seems to be sending out a radio signal, which eventually he interprets as a DNA code. Yipes! Folks from outer space are sending DNA code to planet Earth? Saul handily ties all of these elements together in a terse, provocative narrative. Nicely done indeed: strange, disturbing goings-on, with only two spoonsful of outrageous melodrama. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From the Publisher

"Saul has the instincts of a natural storyteller."-- People

From the Inside Flap

one-chilling novels of psychological and supernatural suspense, New York Times bestselling author John Saul has proven himself a master of terror. Now prepare yourself for his most frightening novel yet--a story torn from the darkest crevices of night. Something evil has risen around you--but how can you hope to run from a terror you can't even see?BEWARE THE PRESENCE!

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

From above, the day was perfect.A sky of sapphire blue, a sea of sparkling turquoise. A scattering of marshmallow clouds drifted across a vast expanse of azure.The wind had died, and the ocean rose and fell gently against the shattered end of a lava flow that extended from the sea to a vent nearly halfway up Kilauea on the island of Hawaii ...The kind of day for which the diving team had been waiting.An hour after dawn, they were aboard the tug and barge that carried them out of Hilo Bay. Now the barge was anchored two hundred yards off the end of the lava flow, held in place by three anchors chained to heavy hawsers. The tug itself needed nothing more than a lunch hook to hold its position, and the surface crew -- with little to do until the divers in the water signaled them -- relaxed on the deck, drinking beer and playing cards, as somnolent as the weather itself. Perhaps if the wind and the sea hadn't conspired against them, someone would have felt the seismic blip and realized that the idyllic day's serenity was an illusion ...One hundred feet below the surface, the two divers, a man and a woman, worked with intense concentration to retrieve the object they had discovered a week ago.Embedded in the layer of lava that covered the ocean floor, it was almost perfectly spherical, its color so close to that of the lava itself that the divers, coming upon it for the first time, almost missed it completely. Its shape was what had caught the woman's eye -- a curve caught in her peripheral vision ...On the tug, the crew set to work to lift the geode from the ocean floor ...As they concentrated on operating the crane, none of the crew noticed the smoke that was starting to drift through the first tiny rifts in the face of the cliff two hundred yards away.A hundred feet down, the two divers backed thirty feet away from the geode, then turned to watch as the cable from the crane tightened. For a breath-held moment nothing moved. Then, the geode -- nearly three feet across -- abruptly came free of the lava....The crane was just swinging the geode onto the deck of the barge when the face of the cliff gave way. As a gout of brilliant lava spewed out, exploding into millions of fragments when it hit the surface of the sea a split second later, the crane operator screamed a warning. Within seconds the hawsers had been cut, the anchors and their chains abandoned, and the tug was running directly out to sea.The water, dead calm only a few seconds before, churned around the tug, reacting to the explosive force of the fast-growing gush of lava now pouring forth from the crumbling face of the cliff."What about the divers?" someone yelled.But even as he spoke, the terrified crewmen knew the answer to his question....Using binoculars, the crew scanned the water for any sign of the two divers, but even as they searched, they knew they were bound to fail. They had barely escaped with their own lives. As the storm built and the seas became great, heaving swells, the captain of the tug turned back toward Hilo and the safety of the harbor.On the barge, three men secured the geode to the deck, silently wondering if it had been worth the lives it had cost to collect it.

About the Author

JOHN SAUL's first novel, Suffer the Children, published in 1977, was an immediate million-copy bestseller. He has since written such New York Times bestsellers as Black Lightning, Guardian, The Homing, The God Project, Nathaniel, Brainchild, Hellfire, The Unwanted, The Unloved, Creature, Sleepwalk, Second Child, Darkness, and Shadows, each a spine-tingling tale of supernatural, technological, or psychological terror. He is also the author of The Blackstone Chronicles, a serial novel in six parts. John Saul divides his time between Seattle, Washington, and Maui, Hawaii.

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