THE FURY AND THE POWER

Third in Farris’s Fury series—The Fury and then (25 years later) The Fury and the Terror (2001)—again involving doppelgängers.

The Fury led us into the lives of the parted-before-birth psychic twins Gillian and Robin Bellaver and their encounters with MORG, a secret government organization investigating the uses of psychic terror. The Fury and the Power finds college grad and psychic Eden Waring hiding from MORG while Portland and Nashville get nuked. Eden, like Robin and Gillian, has a psychic twin, or doppelgänger, the talky, free-spirited Gwen, usually invisible but even more powerful than Eden. The evil Mordaunt, God’s satanic aspect, is himself split in two—to dim his destructive fury—and seeks to absorb Gwen and recover his full powers. Mordaunt announces his new drive for Ascendancy by having a golem bite out the neck of Pledger Lee Skeldon, the country’s leading evangelist, who is inhabited by a spirit that’s one of the Twelve, the disembodied Caretakers led by Pope John who are devoted to keeping Mordaunt in his weakened split state. The Twelve know that Eden Waring, who contains Gwen, is the Avatar, which Mordaunt knows as well. Mordaunt’s feminine half is what has been split off, explaining why he wants to take into himself the powers of Gwen, and so he tracks down Eden in Kenya, as she recovers from her appearance in the last Farris novel. Mordaunt comes as superillusionist Lincoln Grayle, who does tricks that demand real magic and runs a Vegas casino as bright as Spielberg’s spaceship in Close Encounters (King fans will recall the Evil in Vegas in The Stand). This ties in with the Assassin—lately of the FBI’s secret Impact Sector, who once killed the now resurrected Eden—who kidnaps Eden’s adoptive mother to lure Eden to him for a kill that really kills.

Strong cliché-free style, wondrous detail, and gifted moments show Farris chained by genre, a Bernini carving in soap. Great for the fans. Avenging Fury ahead.