The Mills of the Gods

Set in 1925 Paris, the latest from two-time World Fantasy Award winner Powers (My Brother’s Keeper) is a colorful dark fantasy spun from the exploits of the Lost Generation. Among them is American expatriate Harry Nolan, who is confronted one afternoon by Genevieve “Vivi” Chastain, a 19-year-old orphan who holds him at gunpoint and demands to read an article he has been hired to illustrate by a local newspaper. The piece—which was written by Ernest Hemingway—is an interview with an aged bullfighter that references both the legend of the Phoenician god Moloch and a means of destroying him, and it has aroused the ire of the sauteurs, a secret society devoted to Moloch, who achieve immortality by repeatedly commandeering the bodies of young children. Vivi, it turns out, is a victim of one such sauteur, with whom she shares a body. Her efforts to shake this usurper’s soul pitch her and Harry headlong into wild escapades involving Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso, a ghoulish traipse through the catacombs, and a fiery finale in Spain. Powers dextrously weaves invented myth with real historical detail to create a gripping adventure. Readers are sure to be hooked. (Dec.)