Curfew [Paperback]

Phil Rickman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1, 1994

When record tycoon Max Goff travels to the Welsh village of Crybbe and decides to replace the ancient standing stones that once surrounded the town, he unleashes a centuries-old evil. Reprint. K. PW.

Editorial Reviews

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 625 pages
• Publisher: Berkley (August 1, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0425143341
• ISBN-13: 978-0425143346
• Product Dimensions: 6.9 x 4.1 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,122,707 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beware the Borderlands, September 24, 2001

By 

Ryan Costantino (Nowhere, Special) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Curfew (Paperback)

The town of Crybbe, stuck on the English-Welsh border has a dark history. One of violence and secrets, of magic and the paths of the dead. The curfew is observed, surely only symbolic, the church bell tolled one hundred times each night. The sounds of a bell to keep evil at bay. With the appearance of a New Age millionare intent on bringing the town back to its roots tradition is ignored, safeguards removed, and darkness once again released upon the town.

For fans of the genre this book is akin to Horror confection, packed with subtle terror and peppered with well timed gore, references to pagan rituals and occult phenomena the filling and the icing. A true contender for one of the top 20 Horror novels of the last decade. Recommended wholeheartedly. Beware Black Michael!

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Alternate title: Crybbe, November 29, 2003

By 

E. A. Lovitt "starmoth" (Gladwin, MI USA) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Curfew (Paperback)

It is so annoying to buy two copies of the same book, just because it has been assigned more than one title. For all of you Rickman fans out there, "Crybbe" and "Curfew" are the same novel.

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. "Curfew" 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.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent slow-burner, February 28, 2000

By 

AndyC (Canberra, Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Curfew (Paperback)

Here in Crybbe, the apathetic natives keep their heads down, so as to avoid disturbing... things. Until new-age music tycoon Max Goff, a couple of modern witches, old standing stones, and echoes of an evil past react to disturb things anyway. Many characters (Goff, Fay, J.M. Powys, Gomer) recur in Rickman's other books, lending a continuity to his trail of supernatural destruction along the Welsh Marches. All well-drawn, one gets attached to them warts and all. The tension between unfriendly locals, sympathetic outsiders and meddling outsiders is recurrent in Rickman and handled well as ever. There is a novel slant on the theme of confined-but-gradually-escaping ancient evil. Don't expect much gore, but wallow in the growing claustrophobia and paranoia of this nasty little border town... and read P.R's other books "Candlenight", "December", "Wine of Angels" and 'The Chalice" for prequels and sequels.