RETURN OF THE LINE

Brothers with psychic powers continue battling to save the world from pallid ghouls in this second installment of the author’s Heroes of the Line series.

Carlton resumes the saga of Nick Emerson, now 14 years old, and his 9-year-old brother, Frank, in a nameless American town under siege by ghastly “schades,” which have gray skin, milk-white eyes, and splintered teeth in lipless mouths. The schades travel between their world and ours, causing much physical and spiritual violence, but they fear light and can be hacked to death with knives. The narrative opens with Nick escaping a gloomy schade dungeon by means of a dimensional portal and the brothers resuming resistance to the schades using their superpowers (Frank reads minds and communicates telepathically; Nick is clairvoyant, knows magic, and can stop time with his stopwatch pendant). A growing band of schade-hunters assist them, including Mickey, a teenager who was Nick’s girlfriend in other timelines and feels their destinies are intertwined. The schades call in reinforcement monsters called “vestiges,” which are black clouds that poke holes in humans and are vulnerable to flamethrowers but not much else. Brutal scraps ensue amid portents that the Master Schade and his lieutenant, The One, are preparing all-out war against the world of light, prompting Nick to mount a daring operation to capture and interrogate a schade—no easy feat, since they can dematerialize into shadows. The novel also fills in backstory from Ireland circa 876 B.C., where the hero Oemir defended King Conchobar from a rebellion by an evil, supernatural race called the Sidhe. Carlton’s yarn offers plenty of action in a richly imagined fictive world, but it’s also a deeply psychological work that explores Nick’s claustrophobic traumas. The prose is vigorous and evocative, especially in punchy action scenes full of haunting horror imagery: “Bits and corners of the vestige flailed, trailing upward only to snap back to the whole. The ground shook as it shrieked, a sound of spikes on metal, while it twisted and turned and jerked.” The result is a page-turner that packs an emotional punch.

An entertaining fantasy full of derring-do, macabre color, and nerve-wracking suspense.