The Changeling Garden

Nature run amok provides the chills in this first novel, whose rather campy story of ecological horror is a quick, engrossing read until it derails close to the end. Hours after the Carter family moves into their new home, a Victorian surrounded by gardens, five-year-old David develops an unnatural rapport with the plants in the backyard, and housewife Annie finds her soul transmigrating into the local wildlife. Armed with this new respect for the natural world, Annie then prevents her husband's sale of part of their acreage to developers intent on building a parking lot. Annie's quest to understand her family's strange affinity for their gardens leads her through a convoluted plot encompassing reincarnation, herbalism, Mayan mysticism and anthropological speculation in the manner of Erich von Daniken. Elze juggles these esoteric elements with enthusiasm, but the novel spins out of control when she reveals that the presumed perpetrator of several ritual murders around the neighborhood is the pawn of an ancient Toltec spirit who so detests humanity that he has engineered the gradual deforestation of the planet. A imaginative horror scenario thus deteriorates into an awkward, even laughable, slasher tale; in the manner of her villainous Toltec, Elze winds up cutting the heart out of her own novel. (Nov.)