Warlock of Strathearn

An ancient bardic voice glimmers throughout Whyte's 17th-century Scottish fantasy. The hoary device of a mysterious old manuscript--here, a document translated by retired classics master Archibald MacCaspin--frames a tale of the Celtic Otherworld and the strange, lovely and lethal beings who inhabit both it and our own world. Easily deciphering the manuscript's code, MacCaspin discovers that it is the autobiography of a Perthshire child born with a caul in 1640. Almost immediately, the child's supernatural powers--communicating with animals, healing beasts and men and seeing the dead--awaken fear and jealous rage in his grandmother. This venomous crone's hatred, buttressed by ferocious Scottish ecclesiastical witch hunters, destroys the one true love of Whyte's mysterious warlock hero and pursues him to Prague, where the mad emperor Rudolf has assembled Europe's most powerful sorcerers to probe the blackest arts. The unique voice of the warlock sings this saga of passion and revenge in eerie, magnetic quarter tones, echoing the oldest, haunting Celtic melodies, fresh from the twilight between our world of little rights and wrongs and the shadowy anything-possible realm of Faerie. Whyte's shivery, haunting glimpse of the Otherworld is an uncommon feat of literary magic, revealing alluring depth and passion. (May)