From Publishers Weekly
A forest haunted by a horror older than time and channeled by one unfortunate family is the foundation of this gripping horror extravaganza, Campbell's first novel of the supernatural in six years. Set in environs fans will recognize from his early Lovecraftian fiction, it focuses on the Price family, who have had an uneasy association with Goodmanswood since patriarch Lennox migrated to England to study its dark legends and succumbed to belief in them. With Lennox institutionalized and serving as cult leader to some of the asylum's creepier inmates, the responsibility to hold the family together has fallen to daughter Heather, a library archivist who traces her father's cryptic remarks about the woods' history to accounts of Nathaniel Selcouth, an alchemist who resided there and who schemed "to create a messenger or servant that would mediate between him and the limits of the universe, both spiritual and physical." Heather's investigations dovetail with sightings by frightened neighborhood children of a grotesque "sticky man" glimpsed among the trees, and strange events that bedevil the family. Campbell (Obsession) is at the top of his form here, infusing every scene and scrap of dialogue with a sense of inescapable menace and manipulating nature imagery in such a way as to give it a malignant supernatural character. A richly textured tale of modern horror with classic roots, it confirms Campbell's reputation as one of the most formidable dark fantasists working today.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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From Booklist
The inmates of Mercy Hill in England have visions--the remnants of their 1960s experiences with the hallucinogens growing in Goodmanswood, to which Dr. Lennox Price, intending to study them, fell victim instead. The rest of his family wasn't immune to the woods' allure, either. His younger daughter, just returned from the Americas, went there ostensibly for research for her next book. His grandson discovered himself unable to leave the area, even for a job interview. His ex-wife wandered the woods in search of objects for her art and, after Lennox's death, saw him in the woods' shadows. His elder daughter, though, seems resistant to the madness that plagues the family, yet something in Goodmanswood awaits her, too. At the woods' heart stand the ruins of a tower that once belonged to an alchemist contemporary to the infamous Elizabethan magician John Dee, and there is something far older and more powerful there, as well. This satisfyingly nasty mood piece has one starting at shadows and attending to odd noises in the dark.
Regina SchroederCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.