The Lords of Salem

Musician and filmmaker Zombie, assisted by thinly pseudonymized literary horror author Brian Evenson (Immobility), opens his debut with a harrowing and graphic description of a satanic ritual in 1692 Salem, but that terror isn’t sustained effectively throughout the book. A pregnant woman’s child is ripped from her womb and sacrificed to the devil. The resulting reddish smoke tips off Justice Samuel Mather, who leads a group of his colleagues to root out the witches. After the bloody resolution to that encounter, the narrative flashes forward to the present and introduces recovering drug addict Heidi Hawthorne, a descendant of one of the witch hunters. Strange things begin happening to Heidi, but the reader isn’t given much time to wonder about her sanity, since two sinister nuns immediately appear to explain that the mysterious happenings are of supernatural origin. Ritual murders follow, as do other predictable developments that are unengaging and not particularly scary. Agent: David Vigliano, Vigliano Associates. (Mar.)