I found this novel, the first of Tepper's I've come across that I would classify as horror or dark fantasy, a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand, I liked the focus on female characters, especially Molly the farmer's wife who turns out to be a lot more, and also the eccentric Professor with his dogs named after famous Buddhist scholars. Mahlia, the female lead, a pyschic who is half Polynesian and half French, is a bit weak, mooning about the male lead, Badger Ettison, who is rather a chauvinist. The fact that his wife Carolyn and son Robby are supposedly dead should make him more sympathetic, but most of the time I found him annoying.

There are some interesting twists though I did rather anticipate the one where Roger Bacon, the famous medieval scholar/friar turned out to be responsible for the present troubles. In essence, a field has been dedicated to a labyrinth or maze for generations, with gates that have to be kept locked: a contrivance which is a prison for a very dangerous entity.

Badger's mother-in-law, wife and son are implicated, and the quest by Badger, Mahlia, the Prof and Molly to find out if Carolyn and Robby are still alive, and to combat the danger threatening all of them, leads them to an old friend of Carolyn's with links to the first location. Michael Shiel leads a strange colony up in the mountains with an odd temple and very disturbing 'religious' practices based upon - trigger warning - rape and murder of young girls . That whole section left a lot unexplained, such as how would apparently ancient images of a Hindu style deity or demon be engraved within caverns in the Colorado area of the USA?

On the whole the book balanced out at a 3 star rating for me; it had enough likeable characters and elements, but also sufficiently annoying ones such as Badger to end up as a middle of the road read. ( )

Horror lite - which is to say truly terrible things happen but the atmosphere is clear. Badger and Mahlia are a bit too perfect. ( )

Early Tepper, for me, is like looking at a quilt where the creator had an awesome eye for pattern/color but very little ability to attach the pieces together. Bits of the story are awesome, but bits of it are just sort of hard to follow or uninteresting.

All in all it's a fairly straightforward horrorish book, nicely enough written, interesting enough to keep you going. Sympathetic characters galore, some wonderfully unsympathetic ones, and splendidly horrid creatures. Nothing very special but by and large good enough,and perfect for a lazy Sunday morning. I think perhaps I found the assistance given to the protagonists by some of the other characters just a bit too useful and too frequently so, but that's a minor quibble and it's hard to see how it would be tied up otherwise. All's well that ends well of course, and with these books you do really know all the way through that it's going to finish happily. But despite knowing the destination in advance I still enjoyed the journey. And I guess I don't really have much else to say :-) ( )