A festering supernatural scourge provides a group of aging Gen-Xers with one last opportunity to revive the idealism of their youth in Spector's horror redux of The Big Chill
. In the 1980s, a band of seven high school rebels who called themselves the Underground accidentally accessed a dimension of evil during a drug-fueled party at leader Josh Custis's ancestral Virginia mansion. The event left one dead, one trapped in the dark realm and the rest forever conscious of the hazards of wayward youth. Twenty years later, Josh persuades the survivors to help save their buddy Justin, who's just forced his way across the dimensional divide, though this will involve neutralizing the Great Night, the evil overmind of the other dimension, and freeing the souls of slaves and other sacrificial victims who have been fed to it by generations of Custis men in exchange for political power. While the two main plots—the otherworldly rescue mission initiated by the Underground, and the Custis family's legacy of supernatural evil—never quite mesh, Spector (To Bury the Dead
) writes (and occasionally overwrites) with the brio and energy of his splatterpunk heyday to yank readers in and keep their attention. Agent, Scott Agostoni at William Morris. (Apr. 16)
