Scattering of Jades
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- Published by: Macmillan
- eBook Publish Date: June 30, 2002
- Print ISBN: 0765340984
- Filesize: 685.88 KB
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List Price: $14.00
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Overview
When the great fire of 1835 burns New York City's downtown, Archie Prescott thinks he's lost everything. In the midst of ancient magic and a crafty demon-god, Archie soon finds himself with the power to save the world--or drown it in sacrificial blood.
Editorial Reviews
Thanks to its vivid 19th-century setting, this debut horror novel rises considerably above the average. In the great New York fire of 1835 that kills his wife, newspaper typesetter Archie Prescott thinks he's also lost his four-year-old daughter, Jane. But Jane has survived, hideously scarred and kidnapped by Riley Steen, who once worked for P.T. Barnum. Steen possesses a chacmool, a Mesoamerican mummy through which a proper sacrifice will bring the god Tlaloc to rule the world. That proper sacrifice is Jane Prescott. By 1843, once Prescott realizes that he's in danger and that Jane is alive, he pursues her and Steen down the Ohio River to Mammoth Cave, where Steen found the chacmool years before. After a nightmare journey facing both human and occult menaces, Prescott confronts those who seek his daughter's blood. With the help of a guide, the slave Stephen Bishop (willing to risk his chances of freedom to prevent Jane's murder), he attempts to snatch Jane back to safety. While the plot may be fairly standard, with its theme of "old gods seeking revenge/return," Irving provides a fascinating, unromanticized picture of P.T. Barnum's early career, the bloodthirsty gangs of New York, life on the Ohio River and the precarious condition of even the most privileged slaves. The characterization is nearly as accomplished as the historiography, and the two together make the book an exceedingly solid achievement, with a great deal of promise for the author's future. (July 11) FYI: A descendent of P.T. Barnum, the author has published short stories in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and Asimov's. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information. -- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.
Author Information
Bio of Alexander C. Irvine
Alexander C. Irvine is a native of Ypsilanti, Michigan. His extraordinary stories have appeared in such places as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, and Starlight 3. He is a descendant of P T. Barnum and once worked as a roller-skating waiter. He currently resides in New England with his wife and twins.
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Additional Info
Imprint
Tor Books
Filesize
685.88 KB
Number of Pages
416
eBook ISBN
9781429975803
Awards
- International Horror Guild Awards
- Locus Awards
Excerpt from: Scattering of Jades by Alexander C. Irvine
A bitter wind gusted through the courtyard that separated the sister buildings of the crumbling tenement, animating strips of newspaper and swirls of powdery snow. Lupita shivered, clutching her woolen serape around her as she squatted on her bony haunches and peered into a cracked basement window.
Through the soles of her shoes Lupita felt the earth trembling, as if in anticipation, and shapes rose up in the snow around the courtyard. The ground she stood on had been a swampy pond not so very long ago, and she wondered what the ghosts of that water felt about the magic she'd laid in the earthen floor of the tenement's cellar. Ghosts hated nahualli like Lupita, even though sorcery was the only way the dead could ever experience the world of the living; their irrationality was their power and Lupita's danger.
"Shush, Rabbit," Lupita hissed. The Tochtli, the Rabbit in the Moon, was angry tonight, and jealous, agitated because Xiuhtecuhtli had roused himself to keep watch over Lupita's magic. Whenever the Old God stirred, the Rabbit chattered. Lupita looked up at the moon, then away again. She felt the Old God's gaze upon her, and it made her afraid as only nahualli using one god's magic in the service of another could be.
A little girl toddled into the dirt-floored cellar bathroom. Her mother followed, carrying a bucket of steaming water, a ragged towel, and a sliver of coarse soap. Lupita watched both of their feet carefully, breathing a sigh of relief when neither stepped on the patch of dirt inside the curtained doorway where Lupita had buried the little girl's umbilical cord four years before.
As the woman had approached her time, Wide Hat had instructed Lupita to stay near, and had forbidden her on pain of death to use any potion to speed the birth. The woman's labor, he said, would be short; if Lupita was not ready to deliver the infant and speak the benediction, the sun would pass five hundred twenty times before the signs fell properly into place again. Lupita had prepared herself, and when the woman's time came, the old midwife was there. The girl had crowned less than an hour before the awakening of the sun, during the time most holy to Tlaloc, and Lupita realized that Wide Hat's excessive precautions had been justified. If he truly knew where the chacmool had buried itself... she had whispered the required prayers and slunk to the basement with the umbilicus.
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