Ghostlight [Hardcover]

Marion Zimmer Bradley (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1995

Twenty years after her parents are killed in a dangerous ceremony intended to release the old gods back to Earth, Truth Blackburn returns to the family estate to learn the truth and confronts the leader of her parent's revived cult. 75,000 first printing. $75,000 ad/promo.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Adept at both SF (the Darkover series) and fantasy (The Mists of Avalon), Bradley broadens her range with an entertaining tale of contemporary "magick" and self-discovery that combines gothic romance, urban fantasy and horror. Truth Jourdemayne, parapsychologist and illegitimate child of celebrated vanished occultist Thorne Blackburn, decides to write a book about her much-hated father; to begin her research, she visits his estate, Shadow's Gate, nestled in the Hudson River valley. There Truth meets a group continuing Blackburn's occult "Work," led by the exciting and mysterious Julian Pilgrim. The narrative employs gothic props such as hidden parentage, a secret book, underground passages and intricate alliances, and it isn't shy about flashing occult wonders either, but the emphasis is on Truth's growth toward greater understanding and wisdom. With a strong, though not feminist, heroine and a sophisticated treatment of magick, this novel overcomes myriad cliches?including the charismatic occult leader and an apparently haunted mansion?to offer intelligent, if somewhat giddy, diversion.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Besides writing science fiction and fantasy, the ever-popular Bradley also pens gothic romances, of which this is the first to debut in hardcover. Young Truth Blackburn lost her parents in the late 1960s to an occultist experiment. Now, a quarter-century later, some New Agers mess around with the same experiment, and Truth ends up with the job of preventing a second disaster. Bradley is a master storyteller, and her latest proves thoroughly absorbing. Like the plot, the characterization is stock but good, not likely to surprise or displease anyone familiar with Bradley's other gothics. There are so many Bradley fans that even though this book hardly reaches out to win new readers, it just doesn't have to. Roland Green

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Tor Books; 1st edition (September 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312858817
• ISBN-13: 978-0312858810
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,333,583 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Marion Eleanor Zimmer was born in Albany, NY, on June 3, 1930, and married Robert Alden Bradley in 1949. Mrs. Bradley received her B.A. in 1964 from Hardin Simmons University in Abilene, Texas, then did graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1965-67.
She was a science fiction/fantasy fan from her middle teens. She had written as long as she could remember, but wrote only for school magazines and fanzines until 1952, when she sold her first professional short story to VORTEX SCIENCE FICTION. She wrote everything from science fiction to Gothics, but is probably best known for her Darkover novels and for her Arthurian novel, THE MISTS OF AVALON.
In addition to her novels, Mrs. Bradley edited magazines, amateur and professional, including Marion Zimmer Bradley's FANTASY Magazine, which she started in 1988. She also edited an annual anthology called SWORD AND SORCERESS, which is still published annually under the title MARION ZIMMER BRADLEY'S SWORD AND SORCERESS.
She died in Berkeley, California on September 25, 1999, four days after suffering a major heart attack.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars deceptive authorship, August 8, 2009

By 

pjf "pjf" (MD USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Ghostlight (Paperback)

It's one thing to have a book co-written by two authors. It's one thing, perhaps, to have a book ghost written for some famous person who has never written a book and is telling their story to a ghost writer -- though even those people are often honest enough to indicate the book is 'told to' in the authorship.

But it is quite another to have an author who has written many books have someone else write a series authored under her name, copyrighted originally under her name and sold with the assumption that they are solely the author's work. I never could understand why I could never read anything but the first couple of pages of any of MZB's 'light' series before putting them down, convinced that age really had destroyed her writer's voice. Turns out I had a reason to think that as they were not written by her.

I remember purchasing the 'light' series in hardback because I had loved the authors other works and wanted to give them a chance. And being so puzzled not just at how bad they were, for I had read all her early pulp works and knew she could be clumsy at plotting and rushed and sloppy in finalizing manuscripts, but shocked at how they had nothing of her voice or intrinsic themes. After you have read dozens of an author's books, you know the authors voice, style and themes. They were missing here.

Now apparently, the truth is out that these books now have another person's name on the copyright, (though my original copies, bought when they were first published, have MZB) and this is the person who actually wrote them.

I look at the dust jackets, which proclaim "written by the author of the Mists of Avalon" and have MZB's name on them and nothing of this other person, who did more than "prepare the manuscripts for publication" as MZB writes in one forward, and I really think both TOR who published them and MZB are guilty of both fraud and deception. All it would have taken to be honest would have been to put the other author's -- call her co author if you like -- name on the books. I wouldn't have bought them -- I hate collaborative works, they usually are terrible -- but most people probably would have. I wonder at the sheer fraud involved in this practice and how what was done can be legal. I feel like I deserve my money back.

All I can say is if you are looking for books by MZB, don't buy this series. And you might not want to buy any of her books at all. By condoning this fraud, she certainly didn't show any respect or honesty toward her readers in her later years. And this is from a former fan of her work.

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Get the Whole Set, November 24, 2000

By 

Ann E. Nichols (Sierra Vista, AZ United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Ghostlight (Paperback)

It's too late for me to read HEARTLIGHT first because I didn't find out that it existed until after I'd read GHOSTLIGHT, WITCHLIGHT, and GRAVELIGHT. I've never gotten around to reading my copy of MISTS OF AVALON, so I won't be making comparisons. My previous acquaintance with Ms. Bradley's writing was with her earlier Darkover novels. Yes, Truth is almost as annoying as The X-Files' Scully when it comes to denying the existence of magic. Yes, Truth often acts about as dim-witted as many gothic romance heroines were back when heroines were expected to be innocent and helpless. Yes, there were times when I wanted to reach into the book and shake her and scream out the obvious truths she was missing, but... This was still a gripping novel. I didn't suspect the whole truth about Thorne Blackburn's fate. I loved the house and its grounds. The occult trappings were very interesting. The characters came alive for me and I found myself impatiently waiting for each new twist to be revealed. One final note: My compliments to Carol Russo and Mark Hess. I LOVE a cover that accurately portrays the characters and surroundings in the book. Don't let its beautiful serenity fool you. This book is far from serene.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars still excellent after all these years, June 8, 2008

By 

D. K. Stokes - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Ghostlight (Mass Market Paperback)

I read this years ago, and recently re-read it. It's always interesting to read a book you loved in the past to see if your perceptions or tastes have changed. In this case, I still enjoyed it immensely.

Truth Jourdemayne is the daughter of notorious psychic con-artist Thorne Blackburn, who started an occult movement in the 60s and who killed her mother during one of his rituals, then disappeared.

So she's dedicated her life to showing the truth about such things, scientifically, and put the past, and her father, behind her.

But now she's been asked to write her father's biography, and her aunt Caroline gives her Thorne's grimoire, and Truth decides it's time to go back to Shadow's Gate and write the true story.

When she gets there, she discovers a cult trying to recreate her father's work, and everything becomes much more confusing.

I think I liked this so much because I'm a huge sucker for gothics. The creepy old house, the intrepid heroine, the two men--one good, one evil, but you don't find out until the end which is which, and the whole air of mystery.

The twists and turns in this one were both surprising and logical, and I was sucked right in. I really enjoyed Truth--sure she knows what's real, desperate to distance herself from her father, but deep down even more desperate to know her father and for him to be someone she can love and admire.