Gr. 10^-12. An often wacky, provocative tale of the residents (both living and ghostly) of an isolated Oregon town, where time shifts frequently between past and present.

This offbeat, whimsical tale recounts the history of Point Vestal, a Pacific Northwest coastal town where ghosts walk the streets in broad daylight. Joel-Andrew, a defrocked Episcopal priest from San Francisco, and Obed, his dancing cat, are good-guy newcomers to 1970s Point Vestal. Late-19th-century crime baron and pervert August Starling, now a ghost, plots to turn Point Vestal into a tourist trap and retirement mecca for sinners seeking eternal life. A large cast of characters, both living and otherwise, plus repeated shifts in time between the 19th and 20th centuries, all add texture (or confusion) to what, in the closing pages, proves a literal Armageddon, with God and Satan facing each other on the streets of Point Vestal. By the author of Inagehi (LJ 4/15/94) and several other novels of the supernatural, this present effort is probably best suited for larger popular or genre fiction collections.‘James B. Hemesath, Adams State Coll. Lib., Alamosa, Col. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

In this satirical and elusive broadside at what he admits is a version of his hometown of Port Townsend, Wash., Cady (Street), who's won both a Nebula and a World Fantasy Award for his dark fantasy yarns, creates a curious pastiche that echoes unequal parts of The Divine Comedy, Alice in Wonderland, Pilgrim's Progress and Don Quixote. The operative conceit here is that five citizens of ``Point Vestal''‘a bookseller, a bartender, an antiques expert, a retired pastor and a newspaper editor‘are writing this book, a history of the town. But that's not an easy task, since Point Vestal is a very strange place, overpopulated by ghosts and refusing to be fixed in time: the narrative opens in a year that is both 1973 and 1893. This blurring of dates honors the cataclysmic year that Joel-Andrew, a defrocked Episcopalian priest, came to town, eventually to confront August Starling, the local reincarnation of evil. Featuring a disenfranchised physician, a dancing cat fluent in seven languages, a magical Presbyterian Parsonage (with an all-seeing tower, a personality and an unruly wanderlust) and many extras, the story line winds its eccentric way toward a microcosmic Armageddon. While Cady's first three novels‘The Well, The Jonah Watch and McDowell's Ghost‘remain his best known, they are also his most traditional. His subsequent experimentation with horror forms, as in this caustic fable, may not win him a huge new readership, but it is admirable and worthy of note. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved