Customer Reviews

Shapeshifter

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If your little girl has an unseen playmate named `Mr. Damp,' you can be pretty certain there will be trouble--especially if you live in a crumbling gothic mansion that is just a hop, skip, and jump across a graveyard to an abandoned church.

"Shapeshifter" sets just the right bone-chilling temperature, plus it provides believable characters, and a sturdy plot. As a special bonus, the author wrote this novel as a tribute to M.R. James, whom he calls "one of the greatest ever writers of supernatural fiction."

Amen!

"Shapeshifter" creeps up on the reader. It doesn't leave a trail of blood and entrails, as is the habit of many modern horror authors. As author Christopher Golden puts it in his introduction to 20th Century Ghosts: "Most of those who practice the art of the unsettling far too often go for the jugular, forgetting that the best predators are stealthy."

Laurence Staig is stealthy. He relies on half-glimpsed, misshapen shadows, nightmares, a sarcophagus with a strange glass inset. Even the little girl, nicknamed Sprog, develops a darker side as this novel progresses. Mr. Damp is the ultimate prize of what started off as a harmless frog collection.

The story is told from the viewpoints of a widower and his three daughters, who are renting an old mansion called `The Grange.' The part-time handyman says of the house: "She's an old place, mostly fall'n down. Looks all right from the outside, I s'pose. It's dark inside, though. Dark and damp in the long nights..."

The widower is renting The Grange because he is a stained glass artist, who has been hired to restore the windows of an abandoned church next door. Some of the panes had been smashed a century earlier by an angry crowd of Victorian peasants, who felt that their clergyman-designer was up to no good: Dr. Barrow forced his Sunday School students to pose for characters in the windows, and one of the children eventually disappeared, as did the Reverend Doctor and his misshapen assistant.

But the unpleasant history of the church went even further back, to a medieval monk, who was originally buried in a sarcophagus in the church, then disinterred and thrown down a well when his practice of the Dark Arts was finally brought to light.

Admirers of M. R. James will be delighted by the Jamesian touches in this novel, such as the sundial that hides a terrible secret under its slimy green plinth. I had to keep setting this novel aside after reading a few pages, to remind myself of the `real world' outside of its claustrophobic depths.