The Dragon Charmer

Before Fern Capel, the p.r. consultant and reluctant witch of "Prospero's Children "(2000), gets married, she must grapple with a host of uninvited supernatural guests, including an ancient demon who just won't behave. Siegel's second mix of farce and fantasy has its moments, as when Gaynor Mobberley, Fern's mousy college chum, returns with her to Fern's ancestral Yorkshire manor to help plan Fern's wedding, and there finds malignant spirits forcing her to watch television. "I'll tell you a secret," snickers the dark soul of a dead witch, "there is no television beyond the Gate of Death. . . . Live yourself a life worth watching, before it's too late." Alas, this kind of exuberant cleverness, which pits the mundane tedium of an English country wedding against a dramatically over-the-top supernatural war for Fern's soul, is difficult to sustain, especially when Siegel piles on the purple prose in telling about the blighted hell lurking just beyond Fern's everyday world, where cackling harpies cling to a mystical Tree, dead heads hanging from its branches. The best turns here are in the mundane world, where Fern's tormented adolescent brother Will, who fancies himself an artist, passes time with the house goblin, an irrepressible Scottish sprite named Bradachin, while Will develops a passionate crush on Gaynor. Will, Gaynor, and Fern all possess an eerie sensitivity to supernatural beings, especially the dreaded Azmordis, a prehistoric nasty who has possessed the body of creepy medievalist Dr. Jerrold Laye. Azmordis, through Laye, schemes to use Gaynor and Will to force Fern to use "her "witchy talents to help bring to term a fire-breathing dragon waiting to hatch from somewhere below the basement of dreary Drakemyre Hall. An uneven but winsomely wry entry in what is now a series parodying gothic excess and British high-fantasy cliches. (Kirkus Reviews)