Alchemy: the summoning and control of demons. Those who cross the alchemist are in danger of being disposed of. The easiest way to do this? Cast the runes: strips of flesh made from the dried skin of a child sacrifice and inscribed with the time the victim has yet to live... When trucker Josh Spiller pulls his rig into the small town of Furnace, Virginia, all he wants is a decent meal before getting back on the road and away from his memories of a bitter quarrel with his girlfriend. Instead, he witnesses a baby's violent death and can't convince the sheriff that the upstanding, well-dressed woman he saw leaving the scene was responsible. Shaken by his experience, he rolls out of Furnace, stopping to pick up a desperately attractive, female hitchhiker who seems to have the answers to some of his questions about the inhabitants of Furnace--and who is just as anxious to get out of town as he is. Soon after, Josh begins to feel eyes watching him--the burning eyes of misshapen creatures. Is it possible to have nightmares while you're awake? And just as his grip on what's real and what's imagined begins to slip, he makes a bizarre discovery: someone has slipped him what looks like parchment, inscribed with the words, "five days alive permitted." Something unnatural is happening in Furnace, but will Josh be around long enough to unravel its secrets?

Furnace

Literature & Fiction

Gray, Muriel

Contemporary

Harpercollins Canada

Among mountains of steaming trash in the backstreets of Lima, three young boys are trying to raise an ancient demon from a bizarre little doll. Their incantations aren’t working, they think, not waiting to see the body stirring, an unseen force sucking it deep into the ooze.Now something is stirring in the bowels of the M.V. Lysicrates, a three-quarter-mile-long Brazilian tanker filled with garbage. A rotting mélange of dead human and animal flesh, twisted scrap metal, shards of broken glass and chunks of putrid meat, it feeds on death, blood and sewage. Lloyd Skinner, the ship’s American captain, has no idea he has a hungry stowaway. Neither does Matthew Cotton, the gin-soaked second-in-command. Only Esther Weiss, an American anthropology student hitching an ultra-cheap ride on the aging tanker, knows what it is…what unimaginable evil it is capable of…The Ancient is Muriel Gray’s newest cinematic suspense-horror, the story of perduamo, an ancient deity, who, after centuries of feeding on the fetid waste of careless civilizations, has a dark power like no other.Muriel Gray, already a blockbuster author in Britain, is quickly building an international reputation as one of the most original, and completely horrifying storytellers of our time. Her blend of supernatural forces and psychological terror that marked The Trickster and Furnaceher two previous novelsis unstoppable, an irresistible rush of fear that has readers both recoiling and reaching for more.

Ancient Tpb

HarperCollins, Publishers

The Trickster

Genre Fiction

New York Doubleday 1995

Harpercollins

HarperCollins Publishers, Ltd

DOUBLEDAY

The Ancient

He is a shape-shifter. He is as old as time. He kills without mercy. 20th anniversary edition of the acclaimed debut novel, with an introduction by Mark Millar. Life is good in Silver, a small town high in the Canadian Rockies. Sam Hunt is a lucky man. with a loving family and an honest income, he has everything he wants. But beneath the mountains a vile, demonic energy is gathering strength and soon it will unleash its freezing terror upon Silver. In the eye of the storm, one man struggles to bury the private horrors of his childhood. He knows nothing, yet seems to know everything: Sam Hunt. All he loves may be destroyed by an evil beyond imagining. An evil from the buried, hated past. An evil named the Trickster. This new edition, published to celebrate the 20th anniversary of first publication, includes a brand new foreword by the author and an introduction by Mark Millar, award-winning comic book writer and co-creator of Kick-Ass, Kingsman and Captain America: Civil War.

Voyager

From the author of The Trickster, an unnerving tale of latterday alchemy and the horrors brooding beneath the placid surface of life in one small town in America.
Something is being born. The darkness is its delight, deep and black and hot. Its growth is unstoppable. It knows who has summoned it. It knows that its carrier is aware and afraid. Its time is drawing near…
When long-distance truck driver Josh Spiller pulls into the small backwater town of Furnace, Virginia, he has a lot on his mind. He’s been driving for thirty-six hours straight after busting up with his pregnant girlfriend; he’s tired and hungry, and all he wants is to get some breakfast and rest up.
But Furnace has something special in store for Josh. Amongst the surprisingly affluent houses, the neat streets and smartly-dressed townsfolk lurks the stuff of living nightmare. A sequence of events is about to be unleashed that will test Josh to the edge of his endurance. A world of sorcery and malice is waiting to gather him in. For behind the prosperity of Furnace lie terrible secrets; and a terrifying fate in store for those who take an unwarranted interest.
Even now, as Josh searches for a place to stop, his electric-blue Peterbilt roaring through the gears, the eyes of the town are upon him.
The nightmare is beginning…

HarperVoyager

Alien, on a container ship. ‘Scary and unputdownable’, Stephen King
Amongst towering mountains of trash in the backstreets of Lima, three young boys are trying to raise an ancient demon. They don't think their incantation has worked; but that night a teenage drugrunner is gunned down across their makeshift altar. As his killers walk away, his body stirs. Not because it still contains a spark of life. But because something is stirring beneath it…
Port Callao. The MV Lysicrates, a three-quarter-mile long supertanker, is being loaded with hundreds of tonnes of trash. Watching from the bridge, in a bleary state of hungover gloom, is second-in-command Matthew Cotton; more interesting is the arrival of a young American student who has missed the boat she should have been on.
They should have paid more attention to the trash.
With its powerful blend of superb characterisation and demonic horror, Muriel Gray's new novel is her best yet.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Gray, Muriel. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Gray, Muriel

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Gray, Muriel. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Furnace

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The Trickster

Furnace

Furnace

The Trickster

The Ancient

The Trickster

Furnace

The Ancient