PROPHECY

``Fear pressed to her skin like brass against tracing paper, rubbing dark lines across her face....An ambulance flashed across, ahead, its siren a swirling banshee that beat her stomach like an egg whisk.'' Nicely done! James will find this—his fifth horror novel— hard to match, since its strengths arise from its modesty, its unwillingness to go for broke at each horror, and—relative to the genre—a creepy realism. Once again, he creates an androgynously named heroine, this time Frannie (in Dreamer it was ``Sam'' for Samantha, in Possession Alex, etc.). Whether this all stems from James' wife being named Georgina is anyone's guess, but he must have a superb female research assistant since he deals in detail with the feminine, from a woman's psychology of clothing, to the erectility of downy hairs, and even to the swoon of her inner organs in a rising elevator. The reader feels plunged into Frannie, an archaeologist in the British Museum, who finds that her parents' cafe has been built on the site of a vast number of murders by a 16th-century pedophile. Synchronicity has it that she falls in love with Oliver Halkin, the current eldest male descendant of the murderer who left a pool of evil under Frannie's folks' cafe. Three years ago while helping out her parents as a waitress, Frannie served Oliver and his son Edward some drinks just minutes before Oliver's wife was beheaded in a motor accident outside the cafe. Is troubled young Edward inhabited by his lingering ancestor, who set up the mother to be killed before the child's eyes? Meanwhile, Frannie's college buddies who once joined her around a Ouija board in the cafe's cellar drop like flies—and the numbers say it's now Frannie's turn to face the blood lust of a living evil... Stupid? Sure. But smart writing keeps it gripping all the way.