The Uncanny
by Andrew Klavan
from Island Books
"Trolls, he thought. That's what it was. Religious people believed God ran the world. Atheists figured it was indifferent nature. But it was trolls. Sadistic little homunculi in leather jackets with lots of zippers. Hiding behind the scrim of being. Working the machinery to maximize human suffering for their own amusement."
A wealthy Hollywood cowboy-cum-movie-producer travels to England in the hope of seeing a ghost, or a voice from beyond: "Something uncanny, you know. Anything. One lousy uncanny thing." He hangs out with a marvelous old woman--a professional skeptic armed with a sword cane and an ever-puffing pipe with a skull-shaped bowl--and the other staff of a semi-tabloid rag called Bizarre! He meets the woman of his dreams, who is billed as being utterly inaccessible and frigid to boot. Then before you can say "conspiracy theory," Andrew Klavan has whipped all of them into a humorous confection with elements of German romantic art, English Gothic architecture, 19th-century ghost stories, Norse mythology, South American cult leaders, Nazi witchcraft, and the Holy Grail. Even the ghost of M.R. James has a key role in the plot.
It's not a deep novel--you get the sense that Klavan doesn't take one iota of it seriously--but it's good supernatural fun. --Fiona Webster
Richard Storm is passionate, hot-blooded, and running out of time.  Sophia Endering is cool, beautiful, and haunted by a centuries-old mystery.  Now the Hollywood filmmaker and the troubled young woman have come together in a race against the unbelievable, the unthinkable, and. . . The Uncanny.
Richard Storm reached the top of his profession producing horror films based on classic English ghost stories.  Now, with his life beginning to unravel, Richard is searching for something to believe in.  Fleeing Hollywood for London, he embarks on a desperate quest: to find evidence that the great old stories bear some truth, that the human spirit lives on after death. Â
What he finds is Sophia, a woman caught in a nightmare more chilling than any of his film horrors.  Propelled by a furious love, haunted by a terror he can barely confess to himself, Storm pursues Sophia through the labyrinth of her family's madness and their involvement in Nazi art thefts, down a trail formed by the classic ghost stories themselves--into the very heart of the uncanny.  .  .  .
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