Hound Hunters

A tag team of Native American medicine men band together to thwart otherworldly monsters with designs on Earth in this thrill-packed third novel in Niswander's Shaman Cycle (after The Charm and The Serpent Slayers). Shortly after Pima Witch Tom Bear is warned by his spirit counselor of ""intruders who wait by the door"" of our world, dismembered corpses begin turning up on the outskirts of Phoenix, Ariz. They turn out to be the remains of abusers of Tohu-Bohu, a criminally-synthesized street narcotic dubbed ""the chaos drug"" because it supposedly elevates victims to the realm of the gods. In truth, the drug opens portals hitherto closed to hound-like monsters (a nod to Frank Belknap Long's Hounds of Tindalos) that have been waiting for eons to bolt through transdimensional doors and sate their ravenous appetites on human victims. Though these entities ultimately prove too humanized and vulnerable to a climactic shaman slugfest to sustain the reader's suspension of disbelief, this novel succeeds through its intelligent fusion of cosmic horror and Native American mysticism and tripwire pacing that keeps events hurtling energetically to the finale.