Crybbe

Rating:
Summary: Alternate title: Curfew
Review: Woe betide the unsuspecting city-raised New Ager who ventures out into Crybbe's mean streets while curfew is being rung--especially during one of the unnervingly frequent power blackouts.

According to author, Phil Rickman Crybbe is a composite of Knighton, Presteigne, Clun, and Bishop's Castle---and there really is a town where the curfew bell must be rung every night. His villagers are the equivalent of British rednecks, and all of the ghostly phenomena are local to the borderland between England and Wales, including a gigantic black dog that appears when someone is about to die.

Stories of phantom black dogs abound in Britain. Almost every county has its own variant, from the Black Shuck of East Anglia to the Bogey Beast of Yorkshire. In this novel, the ghost hound's name is Black Michael, and it is thought to be the spirit of a warlock, who does not quite have enough power to transform himself back into a man--although he's been trying since he hanged himself in the late 1500s.

One of my favorite characters is killed almost immediately in this horror novel. He is a dowser after earth mysteries called ley lines. In this book, ley lines aren't simply lines of cosmic power linking prehistoric sites. They are the ancient pathways of the dead, and sure enough Black Michael is usually seen rushing down a ley line.

A young writer of an occult best-seller, Joe Powys is brought to Crybbe by a millionaire who is trying to remake the old border village into England's new mystical center. Powys makes friends with Fay a down-on-her-luck radio reporter, and soon they are involved in the battle between Old Crybbe whose inhabitants tend to duck their heads and tug on their forelocks in the presence of the occult, and the New Age Crybbe where one can buy mystical lumpen pottery or align oneself with the Earth Mysteries through massage or acupuncture.

As in most of Rickman's novels, the dewy-eyed mystics seem to take it on the chin. "Crybbe" also harbors a serial killer who discovered Black Michael's skeletal hand hidden in his chimney. He goes from murder to ever-grislier murder while occult forces wreak a separate havoc on Crybbe. The novel's resolution gets a bit garbled and tedious when all of the evil forces line up against what's left of the good, and for the first time in 400 years the curfew bell falls silent.

Suffice to say that Joe and three-legged Arnold go on to greater glory in "The Chalice." Fay goes back to work for the BBC. Gomer Parry, the manic digger-for-hire moves on to a prominent role in Rickman's Merrily Watkins procedurals.