NIGHT OF THE SEVENTH DARKNESS

A dark and disturbing foray into voodoo-terror by a master of the religious-conspiracy thriller (The Brotherhood of the Tomb, 1990; The Ninth Buddha, 1989, etc.). From the opening pages, in which Haitian-born heroine Angelina Hammel finds a host of corpses hidden beneath the floorboards of her Brooklyn apartment, Easterman spins a morbid tale of unrelenting evil that's a far and eerie cry from the high adventure of his earlier work. In sinuous prose tinged with despair, the horrors pile up: one body is trapped in a living death—a zombi?; Angelina's ethnologist husband, Rick, is found murdered and mutilated in a nearby park; Reuben Abrams, the cop assigned to Angelina, uncovers a weird sanctum of evil beneath the Brooklyn waterfront, full of spiders, more bodies, the mummy of a sorcerer, and half of a golden disc. This disc, Abrams learns, is the talisman of the Seventh Order, a reactionary, voodoo-based global conspiracy that includes ``senators, judges, industrialists,'' and that prophesies ``the resurrection of all things when the true king'' sits on his voodoo throne. Members of the Order soon give violent chase to Angelina, whom they rightly believe holds information—derived from her husband's research—threatening to the Order. The brutal murder of Abrams's parents (partly repaid by the cop with a syringe through the assassin's eyeball) is only one atrocity of many as the duo, aided by a secret federal anti-Order cabal, fend off attack. Prompted by the cabal, Abrams and Angelina, now uneasy lovers, fly to the Order's homeground, Haiti—where the action turns darker still, a febrile shock-scape of voodoo ceremonies, torture, and death (and one whiff of Easterman past—an extraneous but rousing escapade during a hurricane) that ends in the bleakest possible way. More horror novel than thriller, grim and unforgiving, and resonant with menace, decay, and the stuff nightmares are made of.