The Dark Is Rising....: The Mesmerist by Ronald L. Smith

I am the vessel, you see, through which the dead loved one will speak. Actually, it is all a sham.

Since the tragic death of her father, Jessamine Grace and her mother have eked out a life of genteel poverty, conducting faux seances to unite grieving townspeople with their dead, with Jess herself faking a trance as well as the messages on the spirit board she carries into a cabinet.

But this time the message, a verse from an old nursery song, seems both inane and yet sinister.

"Ring around the rosy, a pocketful of posies--
Ashes! Ashes! We all fall down."

And below, written in a spidery scrawl, one single letter...

M

With little explanation, Jessamine's mother hastily whisks her away to fog-shrouded London, to the house of a wealthy but strange man who calls himself Balthazar and who explains that an evil force led by the mythical Mephistopheles, is rising, beginning with the "rosy plague" which is killing the poor of the city, and that Jess has shown herself as a mesmerist, one endowed with powers to read minds and foresee the future.

"She is coming into her power," says Balthazar.

"What power, Mother?" I ask. I am completely flabbergasted.

Her face is ashen. "There is something I must tell you,... Your father had an ability, the same one you now seem to possess. Jess, your father and I once belonged to an order."

Jessamine's mother quickly leaves her with Balthazar, who takes her on a puzzling carriage ride through the foggy city to a secret, rather shabby house, in the London slums to meet with two other children just removed from an orphanage, Gabriel and Emily, who themselves have unusual but dubiously useful powers for the mission of fighting metaphysical evil; Gabriel sings and plays a harp, and Emily can produce light and heat at will. Also in the house is a servant girl, Darby, whom Emily whispers is a sometime werewolf.

It is all very hard to accept for Jess, whose simple life is suddenly transformed to lessons in fighting with a lash and other magical tools. But when Jess's spirit board allows her to see her own mother's murder, she swears her allegiance to the faerie Balthazar and his mission and becomes a member, like her parents, in the Order of the League of Ravens.

And her first trial comes swiftly, in a dark, deep mine, in which the three alone must fight Mephisto's alter ego Malachai Grimstead and his legions of the undead, ghouls and bitter spirits.

And then the words I have heard inside my head for so long are truly spoken aloud.

"Come to me, darkling, a child born with a black soul. Death is drawn to you.

Stand by my side, darkling, and I will show you how to walk beyond death."

Author Ronald K, Smith's forthcoming magical thriller, The Mesmerist (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Clarion, 2017), makes good use of the drear, foggy, and maleficent Victorian scene to tell a fast-moving, yet allegorical tale, in a setting where a Manichean cosmogony of the forces of evil against good are recapitulated, with the aid of Gabriel, whom we might suspect is the angel Gabriel, and Emily the spirit of Light, help the heroine confront her own personal darkness and evil itself. Even the poor housemaid Darby is herself a symbol of the struggle between good and evil within humans, a theme which savvy veterans of the Harry Potter series will certainly recognize as familiar.

With a vastly different setting but a premise similar to his highly-reviewed Hoodoo (see review here), Smith skillfully builds upon those archetypal tropes--the brink-of-adolescence hero with dead or lost parents, the sudden interjection of hidden metaphysical powers, the magical mentor who offers counsel and training but sends the protagonist forth on his or her own mission, with the help of powerful young friends, to the ultimate trial with the minion of evil who tempts with offers the powers of the dark side--all are here as they were from this genre's deep roots in Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, J. K. Rowling, and Susan Cooper, whose The Dark Is Rising series provides the pivotal plot point for this suspenseful fantasy novel.

Lovers of those dark-side English fantasy classics will be drawn to The Mesmerist, which will also surely please recent fans of Catherine Jinks' How to Catch a Bogle and sequels, (also Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) and Robert Beatty's currently best-selling Serafina and the Black Cloak and Serafina and the Twisted Staff (Serafina Book 2). (Hyperion).

Puppets and Phoenix Stones: Splendors and Glooms by Laura Amy Schlitz

"She is real," Parsefall said. "Grisini must've--"

Lizzie Rose's fingers tightened. "He couldn't have, Parse. People can't do things like that. Magic spells--and evil magicians--"

"It's 'er!" insisted Parsefall. "Grisini did her."

But I am Clara, Clara wanted to protest, and then the word puppet struck home.

"People can't change into puppets," argued Lizzie Rose.

"Look at the gewgaw she's wearin'!" said Parsefall.

"Her birthday locket!" gasped Lizzie Rose. "She showed it to me!"

Yes, thought Lizzie Rose. It was Grisini."

In a foggy, grimy Victorian London, two orphans are in thrall to an evil puppeteer. Little Parsefall is wizened, mysteriously missing one finger, but his tiny hands can manipulate Grisini's puppets with as much magic as his master's. Lizzie Rose has little facility with the puppets, but raised as a much-loved child before losing her parents, she plays the violin beautifully and speaks well. But both children fear Grisini, an aging, and dark and menacingly malevolent master who grudgingly feeds them little and allows them chilly shelter in his dank, decaying lodgings in Mrs. Pinchbeck's boarding house.

But when the pampered but loveless surviving child of the rich Wintermute family sees their show in the streets, she threatens a tantrum unless she can have the puppeteers at her twelfth birthday party. Somehow, Clara forms a bond of friendship with the two indentured orphans at the party, and when Lizzie and Parse learn that Clara has been kidnapped, they are immediately convinced that Grisini, who has fallen under suspicion before, is behind the deed.

And then, hidden in Grisini's musty trunk they find a new puppet, one that is a a perfect replica of Clara in to her birthday dress and her locket, which opens to a miniature of her dead twin, even down to the tiny lock of his hair inside. Suddenly they believe they understand the magnitude of Grisini's evil power and fearfully realize that only
can do something to save Clara.

But there is more to Grisini's malevolent plan than they realize. Grisini is immersed in a struggle with an evil magic more powerful than his own--the witch Cassandra, whose phoenix stone necklace gives her power even over him. What Grisini does not know is that the fire within that stone is destroying Cassandra from the inside out. Longing to rid herself of the very source of her power, she knows that the stone cannot be given away nor discarded, only stolen, and in a tangled scheme she draws Lizzie Rose and Parsefall to her dark, towered mansion in the hope that one of them will filch the necklace from her.

The two orphans escape from London with Clara's puppet, but Grisini tracks them down and follows after them, hoping to regain Clara and revivify her for her ransom and also to steal the phoenix stone for himself.

Like a master puppeteer herself, two-time Newbery author Laura Amy Schlitz skillfully manipulates her characters into a dramatic denouement that will leave readers stunned and yet satisfied, in her Splendors and Glooms (Candlewick, 2012). Reviewers have been universally unable to describe this gripping tale without calling it Gothic and Dickensian, and for good reason. Schlitz's setting, with the cold itself palpable, is seen only in a dim and gloomy light, grimy and filthy with manure in the streets and smelly and steaming with life, while her characters exhibit all of the dark places in the human heart as well as the surprising virtues of love, loyalty, courage, and redemption. Every character has his or her flaw, but except for Grisini, who remains true to type, his greedy and fateful flaw bringing about his own destruction, all, even Cassandra, are at last redeemed by their own transcending human grace. Said the New York Times Book Review," "Filled with heart-pounding and heart-rending moments, this delicious, glorious novel is the work of a master of children's literature."

Recipient of the 2013 Newbery Honor Award for this novel, Laura Amy Schlitz was awarded the Newbery Medal in 2008 for her Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!: Voices from a Medieval Village.