CURFEW

Horror myth meets New Age psychology on the ghost-riddled border of England and Wales. Promising American debut of a former BBC radio and TV journalist who did a four-year radio stint focused on the supernatural in Wales. The long-lived village of Crybbe lies on ley-lines of evil energies that once poured from big cryptic stones that surround the town and from an Ancient Monument—The Tump—overlooking the town. But the stones have been buried or destroyed, and the energies held at bay by the peace-bringing nighttime tolling of a curfew bell. Even so, tight-lipped townsfolk will tell radio interviewer Fay Morrison nothing about the village's evil history, even though Fay now resides there, attending her elderly dad, and broadcasts from a makeshift station in a former men's room of the Cock Hotel. But ``the dragon''—a vast Being of Light now held underground, whose parts are various points in the village and landscape—stirs when New Age impresario and record tycoon Max Goff decides to replace the lost stones, bring new psychic energies to Crybbe, and put the town on the map as a tourist attraction. Soon the dead walk. Fay's dad's dead mistress now arrives nightly and communes with her cat and her old lover. Teenage rocker Warren Preece finds a lead-lined box behind a walled-up fireplace and its horrid contents transform him into.... We follow Goff as he hires old water-dowser Henry Kettle to locate the sites of the lost stones. Kettle once wrote a book about the ``ancient science'' with Joy Powys, who becomes Fay's lover when he returns to Crybbe to claim an inheritance from Henry. The stones arise—and then the whole town's rocking as the energy-sucking dragon erupts like a grotesque marriage of St. Michael and the batwinged Satan of Disney's ``Night on Bald Mountain'' in Fantasia.... Old stuff made to dance anew with smart writing, classy passages.