My Brother's Keeper - by Tim Powers (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

THE TRUE STORY OF THE BRONTË SISTERS AS ONLY TIM POWERS COULD WRITE IT.

This is a ghost story. It is a story about werewolves, and things that go bump in the night. It is a story of an ill-fated land, the pathless moors of Northern England so well chronicled in Wuthering Heights. And it is the story of a real family whose destiny it is to deal with this darkly glamorous and dangerous world.

When young Emily Brontë helps a wounded man she finds at the foot of an ancient pagan shrine in the remote Yorkshire moors, her life becomes contentiously entwined with his. He is Alcuin Curzon, embittered member of a sect working to eradicate the resurgent plague of lycanthropy in Europe and northern England.

But Emily's father, curate of the Haworth village church, is responsible for having unwittingly brought a demonic werewolf god to Yorkshire forty years ago--and it is taking possession of Emily's beloved but foolish and dissolute brother. Curzon must regard Emily's family as a dire threat.

In spite of being at deadly odds, Emily and Curzon find themselves thrown together in fighting werewolves, confronting pagan gods, even saving each other from the lures of moorland demons. And in a final battle that sweeps from the haunted village of Haworth to a monstrous shrine far out on the moors, the two of them must be reluctant allies against an ancient power that seems likely to take their souls as well as their lives.

About the Author

Tim Powers won the World Fantasy Award twice for his critically acclaimed novels Last Call and Declare. Declare also received the International Horror Guild Award. His novel On Stranger Tides inspired the Monkey Island video game series and was sold to Disney for the movie franchise installment Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. His book The Anubis Gates won the Philip K. Dick Award and is considered a modern science fiction classic and a progenitor of the steampunk genre. Powers won the Dick Award again for straight science fiction post-apocalypse novel Dinner at Deviant's Palace. Many of his novels, such as Last Call and Alternate Routes, are so-called "secret histories," which use real historical events in which supernatural and metaphysical elements influence the the story in weird and compelling manners. Powers grew up in Southern California and studied English at Cal State Fullerton, where he met frequent collaborators James Blaylock and K.W. Jeter, as well as renowned science fiction author Philip K. Dick, who became a close friend and mentor. Powers is a practicing Catholic who claims "Stories are more effective, and more truly represent the writer's actual convictions, when they manifest themselves without the writer's conscious assistance. I concern myself with my plots, but I let my subconscious worry about my themes." Powers still resides in Southern California with his wife, Serena.