rather than three related adventures. The premise is
that many worlds exist parallel to one another, and
in one of these a war in heaven is being mirrored by
a power struggle among factions within a dominant
church in a Europe very similar to that of our Victo-
rian era.
Lyra Belacqua and Will Parry are two young-
sters who have been swept up in the struggle. The
previous volume left Lyra in the hands of kidnap-
pers, and readers now learn that she has fallen once
again into the hands of the mysterious Mrs. Coulter,
whose allegiances and morality are never quite clear.
According to a prophecy, Lyra will face a temptation
that will affect the fate of the world, and at least one
group within the church has decided to kill her to
prevent her from possibly making the wrong choice.
She and Will have adventures separately and to-
gether, and some of the subsidiary characters have
their own story lines to follow, the most interesting
of which is Mary Malone’s sojourn among the
mulefa, a race of wheeled creatures whose fate is in-
evitable if all of the mysterious “Dust” is drained
from their world.
The children visit the underworld in search of
their friend Roger and his missing father, but the
outcome is not what they hoped for. Eventually
Lyra will face temptation, just as Eve did, but of a
very different nature. The conclusion is very sur-
prising and quite low-key, and some readers were
disappointed by its subtlety and by the very many
loose ends Pullman did not feel required to clear
up. His indictment of entrenched authority’s ten-
dency to withhold information is stronger than
ever. The trilogy is unquestionably one of the most
rewarding children’s fantasies ever written and one
of the most sophisticated as well. Although Pull-
man has continued to write in the genre, His Dark
Materials is likely to endure as his masterpiece.
“Ancient Sorceries” Algernon Blackwood
(1908)
Algernon BLACKWOODwas one of the earliest writ-
ers of supernatural fiction to use a recurring charac-
ter, specifically a form of occult detective, someone
who specializes in cases out of the ordinary. Seabury
QUINNand William Hope HODGSONwould create
characters who believed implicitly in the occult,
but Blackwood’s John Silence was somewhat more
skeptical, and several of his cases are ultimately dis-
missed as illusions or the result of psychological
maladies.
“Ancient Sorceries” is the title story from one
of his collections and is one of Blackwood’s most
rewarding works. The story unfolds at a very
leisurely pace, a style that has largely disappeared
from modern horror fiction because there are few
places where a long novelette such as this could be
published today. Silence, who styles himself a “psy-
chic doctor,” has a new patient, an ordinary British
businessman with no penchant for flights of the
imagination who impulsively gets off a train during
a vacation in France to visit an obscure village. He
does so despite the enigmatic warning of a fellow
passenger, a warning he will later remember.
The town seems perfect at first, attractive,
restful, and filled with friendly if not overly socia-
ble residents. He takes a room at an inn where he
is well treated though cautioned that he must
come in promptly at dusk because they lock all the
doors at night. It is only over the course of days
that he realizes there is something amiss. No mat-
ter where he goes, he always draws a crowd, al-
though they all pretend not to have noticed him.
Some people disappear in mysterious ways when he
tries to follow them, and sometimes he notices a
movement that seems more catlike than human.
He still feels no overt alarm, even when he realizes
that his will seems to have been sapped, that he no
longer is certain whether he can summon the de-
sire to leave and return home. Things are further
complicated by the arrival of his landlady’s daugh-
ter, a young woman who appears attracted to him
despite the disparity in their ages and to whom he
feels unnaturally drawn.
The reader will probably have realized the
truth well before the protagonist. The entire vil-
lage is united in their worship of satanic forces,
and their religion has given them animalistic at-
tributes. The tourist begins to remember hints of a
former existence and nearly becomes a full initiate,
but a fortuitous accident momentarily breaks the
spell and he flees just in time to save his soul. Si-
lence later determines that his stay in the village
was actually much shorter than he remembered
and that most of what he experienced there con-6 “Ancient Sorceries”