Customer Reviews

Prelude to a Certain Midnight

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Night and the City, Kersh's best known novel, is indeed a trip through hell -- but only an upper ring, compared to the depths he enters in Prelude to a Certain Midnight. This book anticipates writers such as Hubert Selby in the examination of evil; its characters are very well drawn, the crime itself is hideous but mostly kept off the page, the society that allows it is dissected with unflinching attention. Kersh does spin incredibly strong sentences, and often touches the bottom of his characters' souls. But no picnics or fairy tales here. Tough stuff.

Gerald Kersh, favorite writer of Harlan Ellison, specialized in capturing the lowest strata of society. His story of a working-class neighborhood's search for a pedophilic killer, led by an amateur neighborhood sleuth, reads like a good tense mystery from, say, Cornell Woolrich. Right up to the end, when the story takes several increasingly disturbing turns that will leave you looking for some hemlock. And yet it's a realistic, painful depiction of the flaws of the human race.