Phantom Nights - Hardcover

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Several usually unassociated natives of little Evening Shade, Tennessee, fatefully cross paths one pressure-cooking August 1952 weekend. After his banker father's funeral, U.S. Senate candidate Leland Howard decides to wind down with pretty Mally Shaw, his father's nurse at the end, and winds up raping and killing her. Mute 14-year-old Alex Gambier, whom Mally had befriended after cleaning him up in the wake of a death-defying prank, is a hidden witness, as he lets his brother Bobby, the town's acting sheriff, know. But going after Leland is a major career risk, and Bobby has to be prodded into deeply investigating by Mally's long-estranged father, a pathologist who quickly gathers evidence that shames Bobby into action. Only Alex knows that the justice seekers have a crucial ally--Mally's ghost, whom Alex has kept from fully passing away by the force of his need for trust and revenge. With engaging characters and deft evocation of early 1950s racism, Farris makes a routine, mildly supernaturalized rural police procedural rather better than it could have been. Ray Olson
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Farris takes a break from the paranormal pyrotechnics of his Fury series (The Fury, etc.) with this well-wrought period tale of vengeance from beyond the grave. It's 1952 in the sultry Tennessee town of Night Shade, and black nurse Mally Shaw has just heard her white patient, Priest Howard, use his dying breath to accuse his slimy son, Leland, of being a thief. Soon thereafter, Leland, who assumes (correctly) that his daddy has entrusted Mally with criminal evidence that could sink his budding political career, abducts Mally to his home, where he rapes and kills her and then covers up the evidence to make her death look accidental. Only days before, though, good-hearted Mally had shown kindness to Alex Gambier, an emotionally troubled mute boy whose brother is the town's deputy sheriff, and her psychic rapport with Alex persists after death. This is a more streamlined story than Farris's usual supernatural extravaganzas, but the plot still has ample room to twist and turn around the complications of Alex's inability to speak and Mally's second-class citizenship in a racially divided town. Solidly developed characters and an authentic sense of period and place contribute to the story's impact, as does the unusual blend of tenderness and grue. Farris remains one of the most effectively surprising horror writers of his generation. (Feb. 15)
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