by Jonathan Maberry

Ghost Road Blues is epic horror that puts you in the mind of The Stand, They Thirst, It, and Boy's Life, but beats its own scary path by being both personal and epic. How's that for a subgenre? Nicely tied to the blues and the dark magic of Halloween, Ghost Road Blues is the first of an impressive new trilogy by Jonathan Maberry, whose vivid prose hits the right rhythms and whose creeping horrors will feed your nightmares until the next installment—and maybe forever.

Pine Deep, Pennsylvania, makes a lot of money off Halloween and related activities, but no one realizes that a series of murders thirty years before may have set the stage for an apocalyptic confrontation between the forces of Good and Evil. But though that sounds fairly epic, through the first book, we are only given the small picture, as the small cast begins to dance around the ring and feint.

Malcolm Crow and his fiancée, Val Guthrie, are about to face the unimaginable. Malcolm is an ex-cop whose own brother was murdered thirty years before by a serial killer who was then killed by a blues-singing vagrant, who was in turn murdered by a gang of local toughs. Unfortunately, those local toughs now include the chief of police, a seriously crazed tow-truck driver with a Messiah complex, and teenager Mike Sweeney's sadistic step-father, Vic—who has made a bargain with some sort of evil force that has been brewing for a long time down around where the killer's body was buried in muck. Crow's friend, the mayor, is a truly tortured soul and a brilliantly realized character in his own right. In this swirling cocktail, inject a carload of fugitive Philly hard-ass criminals, two of them wounded, and the third one Karl Ruger—one of the worst bad guys you'll ever meet in the pages of fiction (or in the newspaper, for that matter). His car crashes in Pine Deep, but he's been drawn there, because his talents are needed. Whatever's mutating down there in the muck, it's beginning to infect certain townspeople. Unfortunately for the town, the month before Halloween is about to become very scary—and very fatal.

The writing has the Stephen King touch—the realistic internal monologues, affecting small town humor, and the characters you love to hate and those you're happy to love. Maberry manages to create people you find yourself caring about, and Malcolm Crow and his young friend Mike are two of the best. You know from what happens that their destinies are tied together, but not exactly how—and you fear it won't be the way you'd rather have it. When Ruger shows up at the Guthrie farmhouse, it sets up a series of very disturbing scenes that beg for film interpretation. In fact, the whole story unfolds like a movie penned by some of our favorite writers, but the use of details and local color signal the arrival of a new voice to contend with. Saying more would ruin this very effective, very seasonal offering that's only Act One of a classic in the making. Halloween, the blues, and good-versus-evil on a small stage with large-stage implications, Ghost Road Blues is high-octane storytelling meant for chilly, full-moon nights.