ROOK

England's prolific Masterton (Flights of Fear, 1996, etc.) begins a new horror series featuring Jim Rook, a California psychic who teaches a remedial class in a San Fernando Valley high school. A bout of pneumonia that nearly killed him as a child has granted Rook psychic insight, though he doesn't realize it. One morning he interrupts a bloody battle in the boys' room between Tee Jay Jones and Elvin P. Clay. Then Rook discovers Elvin's body in a boiler room, with 112 stab wounds. Tee Jay is arrested, but Rook sees a black-suited man flitting about the halls and at the scene of the murder—though no one else can see this figure. Jim's palm-reading neighbor, Mrs. Vaizey, tries to awaken him to his greater psychic abilities, which Jim denies. Meanwhile, he leads his class through On the Road. Then the shadow man, a.k.a. The Smoke, approaches Jim and tells him that he needs his help. Jim is sure that Tee Jay's Uncle Umber, a follower of voodoo, is Elvin's murderer, and that The Smoke is somehow connected to Umber. When Mrs. Vaizey goes out-of-body to help Jim by infiltrating Uncle Umber's apartment, Jim watches in horror as she is killed in a particularly gruesome manner. The Smoke also begins appearing in Jim's classroom; at first only Jim and Tee Jay can see him, although the other kids eventually also become aware of him. Uncle Umber wants Jim to act as his messenger to a leading drug dealer and to tell him that he wants 90 percent of the dealer's take on every shipment. The Smoke, it turns out, is Umber's uncanny henchman. In the end, only Jim and his students can stand up to The Smoke, by robbing Uncle Umber of the voodoo stick that focuses his power. A sympathetic, poetry-reading hero provides Masterton with many better-than-average pages.