THE CEREMONIES
by T. E. D. Klein
I wish I’d written this ...
... because I suspect it has real occult power!
It’s a treat to have an author take his time to tell his tale and use that time well. There’s no meandering in THE CEREMONIES, every scene counts, but the tone is tightly controlled and the pace is relentlessly slow and steady, so what starts as unease is bit by bit built upon, until the tension screams off the page. There's a clever use of other people's books here; the notion, for example, that if you read Machen's THE WHITE PEOPLE by moonlight, certain "things" will happen. It makes you feel that books might have a secret power, and that THE CEREMONIES could be one such. The fact it's the author's only novel and he's reported that "writer's block" has prevented further output adds to the sense of mystery. Personally, my reading of it was bizarrely and unpleasantly enhanced by a series of misfortunes. I caught a serious cold, my apartment flooded, my son broke his leg, and my home city was hit by a massive two-day-long storm, that included a biblical-looking typhoon. All coincidence, of course, but I'll now always associate that run of ill-luck with THE CEREMONIES. It's a novel I'll be thinking about for some time. It's very different to the usual horror novel. Very memorable and unusual. Gets under your skin.
From the publisher
Jeremy Freirs is a graduate student and teacher who decides to spend his summer working on his dissertation and preparing for the class he will be teaching in the fall on Gothic Literature; he thinks he has found the perfect place in Gilead, New Jersey, is a world all to its own, the home of a strict religious sect with extremely puritan ideas. Moving into a former storage building on the farm of Sarr and Deborah Poroth, he expects to spend a productive summer free from essentially all distractions - he is quite wrong in this assumption. Meanwhile, in New York, the rather reserved Carol Conklin goes about trying to survive in the big city on a small income from her job at a library. She meets Jeremy in New York just before he leaves for the summer, and a connection is made which will find the couple developing a romantic relationship on somewhat strange terms. What Jeremy and Carol do not know is that this relationship is the work of a strange, little old man known as Mr. Rosebottom. Rosie is actually the Old One working to bring his master back after a very long absence, and Jeremy and Carol are the unsuspecting keys to his success.
