THE SEARING

Another trashily idiotic rat's-maze from the author of The Piercing. Some thousands of years ago an intelligence in faroff Canis Major beamed a databank of information into a Virginia region near Washington, D.C.--and through the ages various autistic female children have been the receptacles of the databank, thus becoming idiot savants of solar knowledge who tie up with cults of Baal-worshippers. The present-day silent automaton of data is autistic Cindy Delp of Renaissance Village, Va., a twelve-year-old whose look can burn out the hypothalamus of anyone who crosses her. You can see the lightning on her violet eyeballs--so Dr. Sara Marks, a pediatrician who has moved into the Village, is attracted to Cindy, especially when a wave of child murders sweeps the countryside and Sara finds the strange girl to be the likeliest killer (at first the dead children don't appear to be murdered, but autopsies reveal cindered hypothalami). Just as amazing as these events is the incredible wave of spontaneous orgasms (sexy but deadly) happening with ever-increasing frequency to over a dozen women in the Village, including Sara. And all of this nonsense is investigated by a police force of paralyzing dumbness, plus assorted amateurs--so, by story's end, the characters are shouting plot-explanations at each other while fireballs from outer space raze the Village. Stupefyingly inane.