By Summer’s Last Twilight by Robert J. Stava

Deathwatch Books, 2015

ISBN-13: 978-1515150749

Available:  Paperback, Kindle edition

This is a rip-roaring story, combining elements of action, mystery and horror with a coming-of-age story: think of Stand By Me, Jack Reacher, and Indiana Jones and The Temple Of Doom.  The story begins in a town in the Hudson River Valley, where the grandson of Aleister Crowley, the notorious occultist, magician and libertine of the early 20^th century, plots to create a new age and open a portal into another dimension of dark forces.

A group of teenagers, an English-born detective, and a small group of men who are descendants of townspeople who battled the dark forces in the previous generation, face off against Crowley’s grandson, other clandestine occultists in the town and mercenaries led by a mysterious mastermind, called the Weatherman.  The detective, the Weatherman and some other characters appeared in Stava’s previous books in his Hudson Horror series (The Feast of St. Anne and At Van Eyckmann’s Request).

Stava adeptly creates a mood of suspense and dread in which nature itself seems to embody danger and evil.  The heroes slowly come together as they learn the enormity of the threat and power of their adversaries.  Each of them must use their special abilities to fight their human enemies and hideous monsters, in a dramatic, hair-raising showdown.

Stava’s characters tend to be one-dimensional.  Heroes are sympathetic, and villains are despicable.  Sexual scenes are mild.  Violence is graphic, but not gory.  There are more than forty misspellings and grammatical errors that interrupt the reader’s concentration.  These errors were probably missed by a spell/grammar-checking algorithm, but would not have been missed by a human editor.  I would recommend this book for adults if the errors were corrected.

Contains: Sexual situations, graphic violence.

Reviewed by Robert D. Yee