The Cold One

Known for his bestselling young-adult horror fiction, Pike crossed over to adult fiction with The Season of Passage (1992). Here, he brings his considerable-albeit unevenly applied-skills to bear on a murky, labyrinthine tale of betrayal, unearthly romance and demonic slaughter. After a prologue introduces the Cold One, an emotionless, destructive entity born into alluring female human form, a flurry of subplots converge to set the main story in motion. Peter Jacobs, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, receives a phone call from a man who identifies himself as the perpetrator of a recent series of murders. Julie Moore, a Ph.D. candidate studying near-death experiences, is drawn into the case when she meets Dr. Lawrence Morray, a celebrated cardiologist who, 30 years earlier, abruptly abandoned his own study of NDEs. Then Govinda Sharma, a backsliding Hindu, is directed by his guru to pursue the 5000-year-old Rak, a legendary blind humanoid who has escaped from the Himalayan cave to which he was exiled by Krishna. Much gory violence and graphic sex ensue, broken by spasms of mawkish prose and intricate explanations of the origin of the Cold One, leading to a dramatic ending to this fitfully hypnotic but disjointed novel that posits the advent of a titanically destructive force into the world-and a promised sequel, The Cold One II: Seedling. Major ad/promo; author tour. (Jan.)