Curfew

Every night for 400 years, a curfew bell has tolled from the church tower of Crybbe—superstitious ritual or sole defense against an ancient evil?In Crybbe, only strangers walk at twilight . . . For 400 years, the curfew bell has tolled nightly from the church tower of the small country town, Crybbe's only defense against the evil rising unbidden in its haunted streets. Radio reporter Fay Morrison came to Crybbe because she had no choice. Millionaire music tycoon Max Goff came because there was nothing left to conquer, except the power of the spirit. But he knew nothing of the town's legacy of dark magic—and nobody felt like telling him.

From Publishers Weekly

New Age mystics, led by a record producer moonlighting as a necromancer, rouse a sleepy town's evil spirits in this stylish novel of the occult, the first U.S. publication for British author Rickman. Nestled between England and Wales, the decrepit village of Crybbe and its aging, truculent residents are off the beaten track and prefer to stay that way. But the writings of J. M. Powys, theoretician of the paranormal, inspire Max Goff, the millionaire founder of Epidemic Records, to buy up Crybbe and restore it to what he imagines to be its former glory as a conduit to the spirit realm known as "The Golden Land." As Goff and his cohorts--some of them sinister, some merely silly--make their improvements, psychic turbulence ensues that will shake even the most stolid reader. It's up to radio reporter Faye Morrison, stranded in Crybbe with her aging father, and Powys himself, who comes to see the naivete of his former ideas, to ward off disaster. Rickman convinces with his intricate account of the town's hex: ancient "ley-lines" mapped out by druidic-style stones conduct a psychic power that the traditional curfew of the novel's title--100 rings of the church bell every night at 10 o'clock--can only contain for so long. The spell is so complete, in fact, that closure becomes difficult: Rickman himself can't--or won't--quite shut the door on the horrors that he introduces here. Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club alternates. Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

Horror myth meets New Age psychology on the ghost-riddled border of England and Wales. Promising American debut of a former BBC radio and TV journalist who did a four-year radio stint focused on the supernatural in Wales. The long-lived village of Crybbe lies on ley-lines of evil energies that once poured from big cryptic stones that surround the town and from an Ancient Monument--The Tump--overlooking the town. But the stones have been buried or destroyed, and the energies held at bay by the peace-bringing nighttime tolling of a curfew bell. Even so, tight-lipped townsfolk will tell radio interviewer Fay Morrison nothing about the village's evil history, even though Fay now resides there, attending her elderly dad, and broadcasts from a makeshift station in a former men's room of the Cock Hotel. But ``the dragon''--a vast Being of Light now held underground, whose parts are various points in the village and landscape--stirs when New Age impresario and record tycoon Max Goff decides to replace the lost stones, bring new psychic energies to Crybbe, and put the town on the map as a tourist attraction. Soon the dead walk. Fay's dad's dead mistress now arrives nightly and communes with her cat and her old lover. Teenage rocker Warren Preece finds a lead-lined box behind a walled-up fireplace and its horrid contents transform him into.... We follow Goff as he hires old water-dowser Henry Kettle to locate the sites of the lost stones. Kettle once wrote a book about the ``ancient science'' with Joy Powys, who becomes Fay's lover when he returns to Crybbe to claim an inheritance from Henry. The stones arise--and then the whole town's rocking as the energy-sucking dragon erupts like a grotesque marriage of St. Michael and the batwinged Satan of Disney's ``Night on Bald Mountain'' in Fantasia.... Old stuff made to dance anew with smart writing, classy passages. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Phil Rickman is the author of the Merrily Watkins Mystery series.

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