Powers has created a strange and wonderful Los Angeles in which to set this novel: a city full of ghosts - and full, too, of unpleasant characters who extend their lives and enhance their power by catching and absorbing the ghosts of the recently dead. Young Koot Parganas is growing up in Los Angeles in the 1990's, but his parents won't let him do anything normal. His weirdo parents venerate the spirits of dead Mahatmas. At the age of eleven, Koot has disobeyed his parents, broken into a plaster bust of Dante, stolen the small glass vial concealed inside it, and set in motion events that will change his own life, and everyone else's. For trapped in the vial was the preserved ghost of Thomas Alva Edison, and there is no telling what power the possession of that ghost could confer. The exposure of Edison's ghost lights up a beacon for those who can see such things. Koot is pursued through the dark underside of the city, aided by allies as strange as his enemies: a bum and his dog; a man concealed by the ghostly mask of Houdini; a psychiatrist sorceress; and a former television child-star who has been dead for several years, but who is not yet ready to leave his body of abandon his revenge on the woman who murdered his godfather.
- ISBN10 0765317524
- ISBN13 9780765317520
- Publish Date 20 March 2007 (first published 20 March 1995)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Orb Books
- Format Paperback (US Trade)
- Pages 381
- Language English