The Black Carousel

An eerie fairground amusement ride at midnight marks the setting of a sinister dark force that preys upon the innocent and terrorizes those who successfully grab its brass ring.

From Publishers Weekly

If you want a ride to another town cursed by an immemorial evil, Grant (In the Fog) is again at the ticket booth, in this atmospheric tale of a mysterious curse visited upon the inhabitants of Oxrun Station. Whenever the itinerant Pilgrim's Travelers carnival comes to town, strange events occur. People disappear; ghosts roam the streets. Or do they? The "tales" of townspeople who have come under the carny spell frame this narrative, related by an Oxrun writer at a dinner party in his home. He tells of a garden that is inexplicably poisoned; of Casey Bethune, who takes a final ride on the black carousel and is never heard from again; and of Drake Saxton, who hallucinates a hellish horror show about relatives his mother hates. Their bodies died in a car crash, didn't they? Grant works dark magic in the lurid, orange-red lighting of the ominous black merry-go-round. He doesn't, however, anatomize the horror or spell it out clearly. It is the cold whisper of the monstrous and the desperation of those caught in the terror of an inscrutable evil that he conveys with mesmerizing effect. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

The much-lauded Grant is at the top of his form with this new collection of four stories linked by the visit of a traveling fair. Since the fair has encamped at Grant's familiar stomping ground of the macabre, Oxrun Station-the setting for the author's classic The Hour of the Oxrun Dead (Tor Bks., 1987)-the reader knows that strange events are bound to occur. Whether the protagonist is a young man trying to escape the domination of his mother, a schoolgirl recently moved to Oxrun who makes some very odd friends, a townsman bewitched by a carnival worker, or an old man who can't seem to let go of his past, Grant subtly and seductively draws the reader into each character's plight with magical prose reminiscent of Ray Bradbury's. Recommended for both genre and modern fiction collections.Eric W. Johnson, Teikyo Post Univ. Lib., Waterbury, Conn.Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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