Body, Mind & Health - Fiction, Alternate Realities - Fiction, Horror

Chariot

Name: Chariot
Author: Charles Grant
ISBN: 9780312862787

by Charles Grant

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Overview

The four novels of the Millennium Quartet reveal the cataclysms that await mankind at the turn of the century and vividly tell of the effects of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse as they wreak havoc on the world. Now Plague has come. A mutated version of smallpox sweeps the slowly starving world, killing in a matter of hours. The disease strikes everywhere - except in Las Vegas, where, even with disaster looming, people still gamble away their life savings in the hope of winning millions. Trey doesn't have to hope - he knows exactly what will happen every time he pulls the lever on a slot machine. The machine will pay off. Every time. Trey never wins millions. He wins just enough to cover his needs. It's not a bad way to live - except that every time he tries to leave Vegas, Trey's luck turns bad and his life goes down the tubes. As events build toward a final cataclysm, men and women are beginning to choose up sides for the final battle. Two people are searching for Trey, for he, like the ex-convict reverend who escaped Death and the would-be writer who sacrificed his family to Famine, holds one of the keys to mankind's survival. But Plague also seeks Trey, eager to destroy this thorn in the Horseman's side.

About the Author, Charles Grant

Charles Grant has won three World Fantasy Awards, two Nebula Awards, and a Life Achievement Award from the British Fantasy Society, and been named a Grand Master of Horror, all for his contributions to the genres of horror and dark fantasy as both writer and editor. Editor of the award-winning Shadows anthology series and of the shared-world anthology series that began with Greystone Bay, Grant has written several bestselling novels, including The X-Files: Whirlwind, The X-Files: Goblins, and The Pet. Other novels include Jackals, Raven, The Nestling, and volumes in the Millennium Quartet, which begins with Symphony.

Using pseudonyms, including Timothy Boggs, Lionel Fenn, and Geoffrey Marsh, Grant writes humorous fantasy, action-adventure, and occasionally science fiction. Grant and his wife, author/editor Kathryn Ptacek, live in New Jersey.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

One horseman shy of a full apocalypse, Grant's Millennium Quartet strides majestically through its third installment. Following the pattern established in Symphony and In the Mood, Grant foregrounds a tale of personal supernatural experience against a broad backdrop pregnant with portents of biblical doom--this time, plague. Trey Falkirk is a reluctant gambler with a magic touch that can coax money from slot machines. He has never thought much about his uncommon luck, his extraordinary ability to survive serious injury or his ability to elude the smallpox epidemic that is devastating all of America but for Las Vegas, his current home. Then Trey meets the enigmatic Sir John Harp, an aristocratic elder who awakens him to his wild talents and inevitable destiny (which will include characters from the first two novels). Hovering on the fringes of Trey's life are an evangelical gospel singer, a pair of spunky preteen girls and an assortment of emotionally and physically crippled neighbors, any of whom might be allied with the evil influence that tries to manipulate Trey's good fortune for ill. As is often the case in Grant's work, there are a number of mysteries that the author neglects to resolve completely, but the mythic aspects of Trey's adventures--his noble benefactor, his engagement with the Vegas Casino strip that he dubs "the dragon" and so on--give this tale vital coherence and power. Notwithstanding an overwrought finale, this novel bests its predecessors and sets a dramatic stage for the resolution of a provocative dark fantasy series. (Nov.)

Kirkus Reviews

Has a glowing dragon curled around Las Vegas in the night in this third installment of Grant's Millennium Quartet, which features the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse as its framing device? In the lackluster opening volume, Symphony (1996), the pale horseman Death descended on the town of Maple Landing and created a host of bizarre effects. In In the Mood (1998), the horseman Famine attacks New Orleans and mass murderers were loosed upon the world. Now the horseman Plague has attacked the world, with only Las Vegas mysteriously free of the super-virulent smallpox mutation killing millions. Outside of Vegas rests the abandoned village of Emerald City, where drifter Travis Falkirk lives for the moment and protects the little sisters Moonbow and Starshine and their mother, Jude. Travis has a beautifully black-painted and polished old pickup truck he calls Chariot, with which—-aided by angels—-he will right the dragon. Travis also has a magic touch that lets him best slot machines and cover his expenses. As it happens, Las Vegas is off-limits to the plague because the horseman waits there for Travis. Grant's thought behind this quartet is that the turn of the millennium sponsors weird and paranormal events that emerge from the dark side of man's nature. If these events were of a more Jungian and archetypal nature, and less a sandstorm of melodrama, they might be more effective. As is, they feel merely hacked out.