Lye Street (Deepgate Codex)

Alan Campbell has graced us with a 26,000 word novella, a prequel to his stunning fantasy debut, Scar Night, the first novel of the Deepgate Codex. Lye Street ends just where the novel picks up!The Greene family is cursed. Every fifty years Deepgate s scarred angel, Carnival, returns to murder another descendant. Now, five hundred years after the first victim s death, Sal Greene is facing his own doom. His time has almost run out. In a desperate attempt to break the chain of violence and save his family, he summons a demon to the chained city: a warrior he hopes is powerful enough to stand against the angel. Yet the creature which arrives in Deepgate is not quite the legendary mercenary Sal Greene was expecting.

From Publishers Weekly

Campbell's nightmarish prequel to Scar Night (2006) explores the depths of twisted revenge. Every half-century since the Deepgate year 511, when Henry Bucklestrappe was extracted mysteriously from the temple dungeons and nastily murdered, the hideously scarred angel, Carnival, has slain a Bucklestrappe descendent. Now, in 1012, it is wily old prospector Sal Greene's turn to be a victim. He asks phantasmacist Laccus Ravencrag to summon up the demon Basilis, unexpectedly impotent, to battle Carnival, herself victimized by her own psyche and trapped by the brutal witch Ruby. Campbell meshes pity with terror against the bleak phantasmagoric backdrop of a city suspended from chains, swinging dismally over a yawning abyss. In a civilization literally built upon nothing, dark magic and vengeance are the rule of the day, and Campbell will quickly have readers under his creepy and sometimes heartbreaking spell. (Jan.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From the Inside Flap

Alan Campbell has graced us with a 26,000 word novella, a prequel to his stunning fantasy debut, Scar Night, the first novel of the Deepgate Codex. Lye Street ends just where the novel picks up! The Greene family is cursed. Every fifty years Deepgate's scarred angel, Carnival, returns to murder another descendant. Now, five hundred years after the first victim's death, Sal Greene is facing his own doom. His time has almost run out. In a desperate attempt to break the chain of violence and save his family, he summons a demon to the chained city: a warrior he hopes is powerful enough to stand against the angel. Yet the creature which arrives in Deepgate is not quite the legendary mercenary Sal Greene was expecting.

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