Amazon.com: The Summer Country: James A. Hetley: Books

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Stuck in a dead-end convenience store job, young Maureen Pierce has no hope of a better life. She is crazy: she hears voices and sees visions no one else does, and she may not live past shift's end. Walking home alone through the wintry midnight, Maureen is attacked by a stranger. Her gun misfires. Then a second man appears, attacking her attacker--and Maureen must be going crazy again. For the newcomer looks sometimes like a modern man, and sometimes like a knight in shining mail--and he claims that both he and Maureen have the Old Blood of the Summer Country in their veins...

Readers weary of fantasy novels that reuse the same old faerie stereotypes will be happily surprised by James A. Hetley's strong, gritty debut novel The Summer Country. Hetley boldly reimagines the Celtic otherworld for modern times, and he doesn't forget the dark danger at the heart of the myth. --Cynthia Ward

From Publishers Weekly
Celtic myth is run through the mill of cynical realism and ultra-violence in Hetley's harsh fantasy novel debut. Handsome stranger Brian Albion comes to the rescue when a rapist attacks emotionally troubled Maureen Pierce, a night clerk in a Naskeag Falls, Maine, convenience store. After the bad guy spontaneously combusts, Brian explains that her attacker as well as Maureen herself are "Old Ones," supernatural creatures out of Irish mythology. Through the book's first half, Brian and Maureen battle more evil Old Ones seeking to capture them for breeding purposes, while attempting to work out "issues" brought up by all these shenanigans. Along the way they drag in Maureen's sexually voracious sister, Jo, and Jo's boyfriend, David. Eventually, this group carries their problems into "the Summer Country," the Old Ones' alternate-universe home, which is "two steps away from you, in any direction." Hetley ruins his efforts to make this region believable by lacing it with intrusions from the modern world, including plenty of foul language and brand names. Computers and genetics experiments brush shoulders with dragons and curses, and with one world as pointlessly violent as the other, there's no good reason to have two. Readers used to gentler Celtic fantasy, e.g. Fiona MacLeod, are in for a rude surprise. "Frigging magic," indeed. )
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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The Summer Country (Paperback)

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