Naught but a Shadow: a novel of the occult

You want weird? You’ve found it. A sequel to STAY OUT OF NEW ORLEANS, this eerie novel is the third book in the author’s 1990s trilogy. Less violent yet more menacing, uncomfortably intimate, this story depicts a fragmented group of friends in the wake of what psychiatrists call an anomalous experience. Did it happen? If it did, what was it and why can’t they discuss it? And if it didn’t, why are they all losing their minds together? What about their friends who have killed themselves or disappeared? Maybe those people were never really here. Are any of us? And yet life goes on, heedless. Just because you have barely escaped an evil more ancient than the hills doesn’t mean you can blow off work tomorrow. For readers who survived STAY OUT OF NEW ORLEANS, this book brings back half a dozen characters, several key locations, and some of the same drugs. The real link that unites and animates these three books, though, is New Orleans herself: a warm, breathing specter of a woman we all want to believe didn’t drown eight years ago. Curran not only revives her but puts you in her arms back when her tattoos still looked good.