THE TREE PEOPLE

On the Olympic Peninsula's Salish reservation, the disinterring of an evil shaman, whose soul has been immured in a giant cedar for 500 years, unleashes a torrent of deviltry among 20th-century loggers. Michael McTavish, head of Quinault Lumber, has won a contract to log acres of precious timber on the Quinault reservation, on the condition that he avoid the area marked off as sacred. But when someone moves the marker to exclude a particularly inviting cedar, Matt Swayle, Quinault's chief faller, promptly chainsaws the tree, releasing the patiently malevolent spirit of the magician Xulk and creating atmospheric disturbances that spook even Matt and his equally hard-bitten hound. Within hours, Lia Prefontaine, errant wife of local police chief Paul Prefontaine, has fallen victim to the fatal illusion that she can fly. Over the summer the calamities continue: A loading dock mysteriously catches fire; a tour guide disappears from the group she was leading; a bear confronted by loggers flees into the woods only to return with unwonted savagery a few minutes later. But the most painful casualty is Mike McTavish, claimed by a modern-day witch called Aminte as the consort who can stand in for Xulk himself. Reeling from his death, Mike's widow, Hannah, battles to keep Quinault afloat despite opposition from her absent partner and the obligatory tree-huggers. Yet first-novelist Stokes (The Castrated Woman: What Your Doctor Won't Tell You About Hysterectomy, 1986), whose sympathies are really with the environmentalists, pairs Hannah with another equally strong heroine, Paul's twin sister, Jordan Tidewater, the acting tribal sheriff descended from Xulk's nemesis—a woman who gradually discovers and accepts in herself the primeval powers needed to defeat Xulk once again. The Clan of the Cave Bear meets Twin Peaks. Rangy and even majestic, though it's hard to take it quite as seriously as the principals do.