Rome in the Dark Ages: squalid, vulgar, ragged, former glory long gone. It’s a wonderful setting, rich in irony. As one raised in the seaport of Genova, in the shadow of medieval structures city gates, castle walls, ruined watchtowers I was fascinated by the tarnished splendor of a once-great empire and the intrigue within.

Alice Borchardt, Devoted, Beguiled, masterfully places the reader squarely amidst a Rome devastated by invasion, inflation, poverty, decadence, and religio-political squabbling. In this drab, open-sewer city, crass Gundabald and his stupid son Hugo have come to wine and wench away the last of their money. Amidst their decadence, they are to arrange a marriage for Regeane Gundabald’s niece, left in his “care” since the death of her mother. They hope to score big, since Regeane is distantly related to King Charlemagne.

Beautiful but coarse, given her barbarian background, Regeane is naive yet incredibly intuitive. She bears the burden of a supernatural gift that is more often a curse. Like her murdered father, Regeane is a shapeshifter woman by day and wolf by night and therefore also able to benefit from the wolf’s senses and instincts. Afraid of her lupine form, the louts Gundabald and Hugo keep Regeane collared in a cell, beating her into submission over and over. While the wolf can miraculously heal her physical injuries, her psyche is bruised and battered, and she believes herself the freak Gundabald accuses her of being.

On the few, brief occasions Regeane is able to escape the clutches of her hung-over relatives, she finds her freedom on the wooded hills of Campagna, learning about herself under the light of a sympathetic moon. It is during one such excursion that she becomes embroiled in the politics of Rome. Regeane’s subsequent betrothal to Maeniel, a barbarian lord who commands a key mountain pass, is caught up in the heart of the conflict between Pope Hadrian and the Lombards. Pope Hadrian himself sponsors the marriage, while the Lombards want Regeane dead. After a murder attempt made by a Lombard hireling, Regeane is rescued and sheltered and educated in love and sex by Lucilla, Rome’s foremost madam and procurer (whose mysterious connection to the pope becomes important to his enemies). Borchardt only falters when the narrative sags somewhat in the middle and by choosing to present several key scenes offstage. Otherwise, her tale of lycanthropy, papal politics, and romantic encounters blends as well as any of her lovingly cataloged Roman menus. High melodrama indeed, and heady reading. Reviewed by Bill Gagliani.

With The Great War: American Front, Harry Turtledove continues to fascinate readers with his stories of “alternate history.” From his Worldwar tetralogy (aliens invade the earth during World War II) to The Guns of the South (time travelers equip Robert E. Lee with AK-47s), the “what ifs” of war are played out on the printed page. In his newest series, Turtledove returns to a world where the South won the great conflict, but the result, while enthralling, is not very cheery.

What is “alternate history?” Simply put, it is taking a pivotal point in history and changing the outcome to see what develops. What if Joseph Kennedy, Jr., had not been shot down in WWII? For that matter, what if Glenn Miller had not been shot down? How would that have affected Jack Kennedy? Would he have become president? Or would he have joined Miller’s band? You get the idea. In the case of The Great War: American Front, the world as we know it hinges on a lost set of battle plans wrapped around some cigars during the Civil War. In Turtledove’s world, the plans weren’t lost, and the South won the War Between the States.

In How Few Remain, the first book of this series, a second, bitter war is fought in the 1880s, ending in a standoff, but the real story is how the lives and philosophies of the two countries are forever altered. In The Great War, the uneasy truce comes to a violent end with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914; the first World War begins, but this time it is fought on American soil.

Picture this from Maryland to Utah, Quebec to Oklahoma, Kentucky to Hawaii, Americans are fighting Americans, on the ground, in the air, under the sea, in trenches, in tanks, with aerial bombardments, poison gas, prison camps and firing squads. Needless to say, while deeply engrossing, The Great War is not a pleasant book. Despite a plethora of interesting characters, it’s really hard to root for either side. These good men and women are doing awful things and reducing their country to cinders. That is also the strength and power of this book. Whereas in How Few Remain the main characters are Abe Lincoln, Mark Twain, George Armstrong Custer, and Teddy Roosevelt, famous Americans of history play only a peripheral role in this book.

Ultimately, the true backbone of The Great War are those that look with horror at the war. They are the poor and downtrodden, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free African-Americans, manumitted in both nations, second-class citizens in both and the poor white working class in both the north and south. They are communists.

That’s right, communists. They read works by Marx and Lenin and Lincoln(!). And, as astonishing as it might seem, the “reds” offer the only hope the two countries have the terrible hope of the fire that burns all so that life can begin anew. Whether it will remains to be seen, as Turtledove leaves us hanging at the end of The Great War. I’m sure his next book will be worth the wait.

Reviewed by Jim Webb.

With The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, J.

R.

R. Tolkien secured for himself a special place in fantasy literature. Many of those tales of Middle-earth were originally written or spoken as family stories and letters to Tolkien’s children, and his newly released fantasy tale Roverandom evolved in the same fashion.

In 1925 Professor Tolkien, his wife Edith, and their children John, age eight, Michael, age five, and Christopher, age one went on holiday to the Yorkshire coast. While playing on the beach Michael lost his favorite toy a miniature lead dog painted black and white. This loss caused heartbreak for five-year-old Michael, and to compensate Tolkien invented a story in which a real dog named Rover is turned into a toy by a wizard and then lost by a boy on the beach. There he encounters adventures on the moon and under the sea.

Tolkien’s canine hero, who comes to be known as Roverandom, meets a wonderful cast of characters including a “sand-sorcerer,” the Man-in-the-Moon, a wise old whale, and a dangerous dragon who causes lunar eclipses with his smoky “red and green flames.” This delightful fantasy story will charm every reader and is accompanied by Professor Tolkien’s own illustrations.

Reviewed by Larry Woods.

ÊJames Morrow’s latest novel, The Eternal Footman, forms the final part of a trilogy that began in Towing Jehovah and continued in Blameless in Abaddon. The first book dealt with the simultaneous proof of God’s existence and his death. In the second novel, the corpse of God was placed on trial for crimes against humanity. In The Eternal Footman, Morrow examines how humans can exist in a world that has lost its moral and ethical focus, a world in which the future of faith is complex. Morrow’s novel follows two main characters, Gerard Korty, a sculptor originally hired by the Vatican to build a reliquary for God’s remains, and Nora Burkhart, an English teacher who is attempting to find treatment for her ailing son. Although the world through which they travel is an anarchic, post-apocalyptic one, Korty and Burkhart manage to retain both faith and hope.

The humor and satire in The Eternal Footman is toned down compared to the earlier works in the series; Morrow seems to have replaced them with a more philosophical examination of his subject matter. Humor does, however, still have its place in the books, and Korty’s imagined conversations between his sculptures of Desiderius Erasmus and Martin Luther are a high point of the novel, combining the theological with the satirical.

Even those characters who admit to living in the post-theistic world discover that they need to find something to believe in. If they can’t believe in the continuance of a God who has shown humanity His dead body, they will invent their own gods and imbue them with powers needed to serve the humans who created them. These beliefs range from pantheistic religions to a more secular humanist faith in knowledge and learning. With God dead, Morrow is able to turn his attention from the question of the source of evil and instead explore the formation of a human ethical system.

Morrow’s characters manage to reinforce his philosophical musings. Nora and Gerard are complex and flawed humans who are trying their best to live according to their own ethics in a world lacking spiritual guidance. ¦ More of Steven Silver’s reviews can be read on-line at http://www.sfsite. com/~silverag/reviews.html.

Versatile novelists never stay content for long with a specific genre or style. Restless like a big cat in a small cage, they assume another fictional persona, don another narrative voice, and strike out for new pastures. Walter Mosley, creator of the popular Easy Rawlins series, has temporarily abandoned soulful Los Angeles, triple cross schemes, rubber checks, and raw fisticuffs in the night. His old fans will be startled by his wicked curveball of a new novel, Blue Light, a work of speculative fiction. A space-age mortality play, Blue Light does not burst from the starting gate, instead it falters momentarily through a fragmented prologue, where a vast array of characters meet a baffling fate with their first encounter with the all-transforming light. No one is the same after the strange contact. The narrator, Chance, recounts some of this other-dimensional tale from the comfort of a sanitarium. He tells the readers of his endless bad luck, his termination at his library job, his academic failures, and the bitter departure of his girlfriend. And things only get worse from there as the surreal fable soon begins to pick up pace.

Chance, one of the chosen by the light, joins a shadowy cult, led by Orde, a man afflicted with a rare blood disorder. Each of the people touched by the light morphs into a new form of human, complete with exaggerated strengths and flaws. This evolving super-race experiences a quickening of the genes, causing both spiritual and physical changes, bringing them into direct confrontation with the Old Order. The other key targets of the light band together into a group, The Blues, who seek to convert the non-believers into acceptance of their reconstituted existence.

Not always in complete control of this new genre’s thematic demands, Mosley does ask critical contemporary questions about race, loyalty, moral responsibility, and humanity. Occasionally, the writing borders on the farcical during the building of the novel’s curious premise, but there remains an abundance of imagination and literary bravado throughout. Mosley is not afraid to take chances, not shy about pushing into that improbable territory of science and myth carved out long ago by such master writers as Fritz Leiber, Clifford D. Simak, Roger Zelazny, and Arthur C. Clarke. Again, the war of the Opposites returns. Who would have thought that the hard-bitten writer of detective fiction could sing so ably in this key? And then there was the sun shining, Mosley writes in his new-found celestial voice. The pulsing story of creation humming again and again through her inner timbre. So beautiful that it called a song from her depths, a song that flowed out through the atmosphere and deep into the soil and stone of the earth. She was calling to awareness the very atoms that composed the world. If the reader can forget the author’s much celebrated tie to Rawlins and surrender to the lure of the imagined world of the Blues, Blue Light will provide a daring, provocative trek. The novel contains a few miscues, several under-utilized characters, surprises when it hits its stride. It’s a courageous experiment worthy of your time and patience.

Robert Fleming is a reviewer in New York.

When a novel deals on an intellectual level with matters spiritual or supernatural, the urge to try and figure out what the author may be trying to tell us becomes irresistible. I may be wildly wrong, but I feel sure that Ann Arensberg intends some sort of meaning or message in her third novel, Incubus, but I’ll be, uh, damned if I know what it is.

Not that ambiguity in this arena keeps Incubus from being a successful novel. It is satisfying and creepily entertaining from its whisper-of-danger beginning to its thunderous War-in-Heaven-style end.

The story is narrated by Cora Whitman, recounting events of three years earlier, the summer of 1974, when she "spent three months in the underworld." Cora, in her fifties, is the wife of Henry Lieber, rector of an Episcopal church in Dry Falls, Maine. Henry is a clergyman rapidly running out of, if not faith, then enthusiasm for it. Cora is a materialist who maintains, "It was only the prospect of an afterlife that made Death fearsome." Strange things begin to occur. In the middle of April, Dry Falls is hit by a heat wave that, accompanied by a drought, continues through the summer. But only the inhabitants of Dry Falls, as if they were "living under some kind of climatic glass bell," experience the bizarre weather, which goes unnoticed everywhere else.

Then some schoolgirls, messing about in a graveyard at night, are frightened (and enthralled) by some sort of bogeyman. Henry and the other men of the town lose their sex drive. A large, menacing black dog is seen lurking about. Cora sees "signs of disturbance in the reproductive cycle" that indicate that "something in our neighborhood was hostile to females of all species."

Still more eerie: Women have nightmares of being oppressed by a vague but loathsome weight on their bodies during sleep. Things then go beyond the dream stage. Evidence of nocturnal sexual assault of the schoolgirls is found, and then Henry and others witness such an assault — rape, apparently by a demon, an incubus, of a sleeping woman who appears to be in stupefied ecstasy.

What are we to make of this abominable activity, which is real and actual, not some sort of mass hallucination? For an epigraph the author uses the eighth-century Irish prayer known as "St. Patrick’s Breastplate," then precedes each section of her book with a line from it — "Christ before us," "Christ behind us," "Christ within us," "Christ beneath us," and so forth — as if to signal that great faith must be used to protect against great evil.

But what great faith? Henry’s is fading, and there are indications that he is trading his doctrinal belief in the supernatural for a fascination with the supernatural’s current disgusting manifestations.

Cora has no faith. She is completely convinced that the planet has been invaded by something, but whatever it is, it either nullifies the claims of Christianity or is beyond Christianity’s universe.

And yet, at the end, there is a terrifying clash between what seems to be Earth and Hell in which Henry, in his church and for the moment refrocked, puts himself at eternal risk to protect the townspeople from a sort of supernatural Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Well, it is entirely captivating, and to expect a Charles Williams-style allegory is probably pointless. With it all I can pick only two superficial nits.

One is that, unlike their Roman Catholic and Methodist clerical brethren, Episcopal priests normally are not assigned to churches by their bishops, as Henry is here, but are chosen ("called") by a committee of the parish, typically after lengthy internecine wrangling.

The other is that it stretches credulity to maintain that no one outside Dry Falls would notice a three-month abnormality in the weather and reproductive cycle. But then, I suppose, we’re not dealing with logic but with the demonic. And demons, like extraterrestrial aliens, presumably prefer to conduct their depredations in secret. Where is Kevin McCarthy when we need him?