A New Novel From Award-Winning Master of Fantasy and Science Fiction Tim Powers. A modern ghost story as only Tim Powers can write it.
Something weird is happening to the Los Angeles freeways—phantom cars, lanes from nowhere, and sometimes unmarked offramps that give glimpses of a desolate desert highway—and Sebastian Vickery, disgraced ex-Secret Service agent, is a driver for a covert supernatural-evasion car service. But another government agency is using and perhaps causing the freeway anomalies, and their chief is determined to have Vickery killed because of something he learned years ago at a halted Presidential motorcade.
Reluctantly aided by Ingrid Castine, a member of that agency, and a homeless Mexican boy, and a woman who makes her living costumed as Supergirl on the sidewalk in front of the Chinese Theater, Vickery learns what legendary hell it is that the desert highway leads to—and when Castine deliberately drives into it to save him from capture, he must enter it himself to get her out.
Alternate Routes is a fast-paced supernatural adventure story that sweeps from the sun-blinded streets and labyrinthine freeways of Los Angeles to a horrifying other world out of Greek mythology, and Vickery and Castine must learn to abandon old loyalties and learn loyalty to each other in order to survive as the world goes mad around them.
Why did Cecil B. DeMille really bury the Pharaoh’s Palace set after he filmed The Ten Commandments in 1923?
Fugitives Sebastian Vickery and Ingrid Castine find themselves plunged into the supernatural secrets of Los Angeles—from Satanic indie movies of the ‘60s, to the unqiet La Brea Tar Pits at midnight, to the haunted Sunken City off the coast of San Pedro . . . pursued by a Silicon Valley guru who is determined to incorporate their souls into the creation of a new and predatory World God.
ROGUE AGENTS SWEPT UP IN THE SEARCH FOR AN ANCIENT RELIC IN A UFO NOVEL AS ONLY TIM POWERS COULD WRITE IT!
Sebastian Vickery has learned something about UFOs that he shouldn’t have—and Naval Intelligence, desperate to silence him, orders his old partner, Agent Ingrid Castine, to trap him.
But Castine risks career, liberty, and maybe even life, to warn Vickery—and now they’re both fugitives, on the run from both the U.S. government and agents of the Russian GRU Directorate, which has its own uses for the UFO intelligence.
With the unlikely aid of a renegade Russian agent, a homeless Hispanic boy, and an eccentric old Flat-Earther, Vickery and Castine must find an ancient relic that spells banishment to the alien species, and then summon the things and use it against them—in a Samson-like confrontation that looks likely to kill them as well.
Sweeping from the Giant Rock monolith in the Mojave Desert to a cultist temple in the Hollywood Hills, from a monstrous apparition in the Los Angeles River to a harrowing midnight visitation on a boat off Long Beach Harbor, Stolen Skies is an alien-encounter novel like no other.
Supernatural Adventure from a Master of Modern Fantasy
The magical King of the West has been killed in California, and his assassin is one of the multiple personalities in the head of Janis Cordelia Plumtree—but which one?
One of them is a streetwise pickpocket. Another is dead, and can only speak in quotes from Shakespeare. And another seems to be the unquiet ghost of her father. And there are many others.
Sid Cochran is a one-time winemaker who blames his wife's suicide on the wine-god Dionysus, and believes that Dionysus is now pursuing him.
Cochran and Plumtree escape together from a mental hospital in Los Angeles, and—pursued by ghosts, gangsters, and a crazy psychiatrist—set out for San Francisco and the wine country to try to restore the dead King of the West to life.
But the god Dionysus himself is a player in this perilous game—and not on their side.
A heart-stopping supernatural adventure from one of fantasy fiction's most original talents—back in print!
Ghosts can be caught, and bottled, and sold by covert dealers to addicts who inhale the things—and when a young boy named Kootie accidentally inhales the ghost of Thomas Edison, he finds that all the factions of Los Angeles' occult underground are after him, determined to kill him and get Edison's powerful ghost for themselves.
Aided by Edison's confused and irascible ghost, Kootie flees—and finds himself dodging perils natural and supernatural in the gritty alleys and trainyards of a Los Angeles that tourists never see.
From the slums around the L.A. River, to the abandoned Houdini mansion in the Hollywood Hills, to a final dramatic confrontation on the haunted ocean liner Queen Mary docked in Long Beach, Expiration Date is a heart-stopping supernatural adventure from one of fantasy fiction's most original talents.
Twenty pulse-pounding, mind-bending tales of science fiction, twisted metaphysics, and supernatural wonder from the two-time World Fantasy and Philip K. Dick Award winning author of The Anubis Gates and On Stranger Tides.
A complete palette of story-telling colors from Powers, including acclaimed tale “The Bible Repairman,” where a psychic handyman supernaturally eliminates troublesome passages of the Bible for paying clients finds the remains of his own broken soul on the line when tasked with rescuing the kidnapped ghost of a rich man’s daughter. Time travel takes a savage twist in “Salvage and Demolition,” where the chance discovery of a long-lost manuscript throws a down-and-out book collector back in time to 1950s San Francisco where he must prevent an ancient Sumeric inscription from dooming millions in the future. Humor and horror mix in “Sufficient unto the Day,” when a raucous Thanksgiving feast takes a dark turn as the invited ghosts of relatives past accidentally draw soul-stealing demons into the family television set. And obsession and vengeance survive on the other side of death in “Down and Out in Purgatory,” where the soul of a man lusting for revenge attempts to eternally eliminate the killer who murdered the love of his life. Wide-ranging, wonder-inducing, mind-bending—these and other tales make up the complete shorter works of a modern-day master of science fiction and fantasy.
