Necroscope: Harry and the Pirates and Other tales from the Lost Years
by Brian Lumley
Tor Books, $23.99, 189 pp.
Harry Keogh has the unique and uncanny ability to speak with the souls of the dead who have not yet crossed over the mysterious threshold of the afterlife. What holds them back? Some linger for affection’s sake – including Harry’s own mother. Others are serving a sort of penance, perhaps self-imposed, before they are at liberty to cross. Some prefer the known miseries of decomposition to the unknown of the Great Perhaps. And a few have agendas…. Most of the Great Majority, as Harry often calls them, are eager for conversation with the anomalous Harry. Some souls he is able to help; at times, the dead help him, with information, or even by lending him their personalities and abilities, as when he has to fight off thugs.

Harry, at the time of these three stories, is on a doomed quest to find the young wife and infant son he lost in the aftermath of a previous adventure, as the author explains in an Introduction.

In “For the Dead Travel Slowly,” Harry encounters the sole survivor of an old race that has for millennia been the terror of Hazeldene woods. This entity – it’s a horrific version of an Ent – needs to occasionally consume a human or two, especially now as it is on the verge of producing offspring. Its modus operandi is to put forth pheromones that lure, then arouse, and finally sedate young lovers. While they sleep, it flays then devours them. Once in a while it only gets to eat one, and the survivor occasionally makes a brief nuisance of itself. In such instances, the creature can resort to another chemical cocktail, one that induces suicidal depression.

Harry is first made aware of something wrong when he hears the cries of the devoured souls, which are held captive by the monster and unable to go beyond. In his quest for information to unravel the mystery, Harry finds references to disappearances dating back to Roman times. He also encounters the two men who fiercely refuse to forget the death of the girl they both loved 15 years ago.

In the second, titular story a Viking and a pirate vie as storytellers for Harry’s attention. Most of the time Harry is sitting in a graveyard or wandering by a lonely coast as he listens to the dead men telling tales of love and violence on the high seas. Slowly, Harry realizes that he is in terrible danger; and the little, little warnings that at first scarcely registered only make sense when it is too late for Harry to save himself. Fortunately, he has allies in low – and high – places, so Harry lives to continue his wanderings.

The last story, “Old Man with a Blade,” is barely three pages long. It is an eerie view through the eyes and mind of Death as he roams the streets.

These narratives are written in the evocative, word-rich style that makes horror fantasy an art form to be savoured; Lumley is, after all, a Lovecraftian. The character Harry Keogh has a strong following and is probably in a good position to find new readers as well, for that most popular of themes, vampiric encounters, is at the heart of several of the 16 Necroscope volumes. ~~ Chris Paige.