The Ancient

Among mountains of steaming trash in the backstreets of Lima, three young boys are trying to raise an ancient demon from a bizarre little doll. Their incantations aren't working, they think, not waiting to see the body stirring, an unseen force sucking it deep into the ooze. Now something is stirring in the bowels of the M.V. Lysicrates, a three-quarter-mile-long Brazilian tanker filled with garbage. A rotting mélange of dead human and animal flesh, twisted scrap metal, shards of broken glass and chunks of putrid meat, it feeds on death, blood and sewage. Lloyd Skinner, the ship's American captain, has no idea he has a hungry stowaway. Neither does Matthew Cotton, the gin-soaked second-in-command. Only Esther Weiss, an American anthropology student hitching an ultra-cheap ride on the aging tanker, knows what it is...what unimaginable evil it is capable of... The Ancient is Muriel Gray's newest cinematic suspense-horror, the story of perduamo, an ancient deity, who, after centuries of feeding on the fetid waste of careless civilizations, has a dark power like no other. Muriel Gray, already a blockbuster author in Britain, is quickly building an international reputation as one of the most original, and completely horrifying storytellers of our time. Her blend of supernatural forces and psychological terror that marked The Trickster and Furnace--her two previous novels--is unstoppable, an irresistible rush of fear that has readers both recoiling and reaching for more.