Incarnate

Campbell's restraint and quiet stylishness are welcome commodities in the occult genre - but once again, as in The Parasite and The Nameless, his plotting is more muddled than subtle; and this time a multiple focus results in an unusually long and sluggish narrative. Eleven years back, five Britishers with clairvoyant-dream powers were gathered together for an experiment - abruptly ended when the criss-crossing dreams got too disturbing. So now, in alternating chapters, Campbell follows these five psychically gifted folks, all of whom are trying to forget or suppress their talents. Molly is a TV production assistant in London, in love with US filmmaker Martin; while working with him on a police-brutality documentary, she dreams that the police confess to the murder of a black prisoner - which leads to an actual confession. Helen is an unemployed librarian, determined to conceal her dream-power from her young daughter Susan (who has a creepy psychic playmate). Joyce is a fanatic social-worker, devoted to her center for the elderly - which is in danger of being eliminated. Freda is a provincial spinster, reluctantly using her powers to summon up dead husbands (or facsimiles thereof) for her widowed friends. And young Danny is a paranoid sexual psychopath, obsessed with S/M pornography, taking revenge on the female doctor from that bygone experiment (or is she just a psychic figment?). . . and planning similar revenge on Molly. Eventually, however, things get out of hand for all five psychics - Joyce's husband is driven to suicide, wee Susan gets possessed, Molly is beaten by Martin (or his psychic equivalent). So finally, through a series of coincidences and compulsions, they wind up together again - now realizing that their overlapping psychic force has somehow generated a Satanic enemy in human form (a Mr. Sage). . . whom they must conquer by. . . well, just how three of the dreamers survive isn't made quite clear. ("Don't ask how, just hold me," says Molly to the understandably baffled Martin.) Agreeable British backgrounds, nicely moody atmosphere - but it's all a slow, meandering build-up to an occult showdown that lacks the clarity, vividness, and chill of Stephen King or Robert R. McCammon (Mystery Walk). (Kirkus Reviews)