THE AUGURIES

A mythical book holds the key to terrifying events.

In a London suburb, an altar boy hears troubling noises coming
from a coffin, but fellow altar boy Peter Jackson hears nothing. Back home,
Peter mentions the phenomenon to his clever sister, Dawn, who calls it the
Auguries, a manifestation of the unrestful dead described in an ancient book
they’ve discovered among their grandfather’s possessions. The two lived with
their grandfather, but when he died, Dawn refused to call the authorities. So
they’re living off his debit card while an unconcerned Dawn uses the
information in the book. Her first experiment involves cutting off the head of
their pet fish, who continues to swim around. Her next is killing Peter and raising
him from the dead. Suddenly odd and alarming things start to happen. An
excursion boats sinks in the Thames with no survivors. Statues all over London
begin to bleed. Professor Juliet Harrington, an expert on the Almanac
of Forbidden Wisdom, a lost volume thought to have been written in the 16th
century, is called to a meeting with the Home Secretary, the Archbishop of
Canterbury, and the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, who ask about the
Auguries, which, she explains, occur whenever someone uses the book. Juliet
believes the volume was compiled in 1530 by a group of occult practitioners led
by the German alchemist Gunter Keller. When the calamities continue with an
outbreak of the plague and a plane crash, Juliet is commissioned to track down
the book and find whomever is using it. The pressure mounts as London undergoes
disaster after disaster and the fate of the world hangs in the balance.

Cottam (The Lucifer Chord, 2018, etc.) is a masterly
maven of the deeply disturbing occult. His latest may well leave you with
nightmares.