Ship of ghouls

>> Muriel Gray’s The Ancient is scary enough for Stephen King

by JULIET WATERS

Someday someone should write a book about Muriel Gray. In the early ’80s, after leaving her band, the Von Trapp Family, Gray became a post-punk British TV personality. Known for her trademark bleached blond hair and rude, rant-a-holic Scottish wit, she went on to launch a TV production company that is still the biggest in Scotland. While continuing to write strong-headed opinion pieces in various newspapers, she also became the first female rector of the University of Edinburgh.

Then her middle child, under the care of a nanny, fell into a swimming pool and suffered severe brain damage. Gray became a stay-at-home mum with a part-time job. By day she took care of her three kids, by night she became a horror writer. Her first two novels, The Trickster and The Furnace, generated enough buzz that Stephen King requested the advance proof of her latest, The Ancient. His review: “Scary and unputdownable. If you’re going to read a single suspenser in 2001, make it this one.”
High praise, though what King considers scary and “unputdownable” is probably unbearable for the average reader. Indeed, The Ancient is harsh, gruesome stuff. It’s scary and, worse than that, it’s gross, albeit in a bleak but carnivorously sexy way.

The story opens among mountains of trash in the back streets of Lima, Peru. Three teenage boys are performing a ritual they believe will give them supernatural powers. After capturing a rat and cutting out its beating heart, they recite an incantation over a bizarre family heirloom. They are cut short by Peruvian mafia who are chasing another teenage boy through the dump. He is shot dead near the makeshift altar.

This coincidence is enough the raise the spirit of an ancient Incan demon who thrives on virgin sacrifices. It looks, however, like he’s going to have to restart life as a derelict demon composed of trash and human body parts—until he finds a home, slithering his way into the cargo of a three-quarter mile supertanker.

But this supertanker is manned by superlosers. The captain is a taciturn, morally bankrupt Vietnam vet. The first officer is a severe drunk who can’t get through an hour without a mug of vodka. The crew is composed mostly of young Filipino boys (tasty demon dinners) and resentful, mutinous officers. Fortunately—it might seem—this tanker is on a return mission and isn’t carrying anything more toxic than a mysterious cargo of garbage (not even compacted garbage, but loose, disgusting garbage, the smell of which permeates the ship).
Enter the vestal virgin. Esther Mulholland is the updated version. On her way back to college after backpacking through Peru, a military scholarship has helped this adult child of another severe alcoholic evade her destiny as Texas trailer trash. When facing an ancient demon and a shipload of desperate men, it’s a good thing when the vestal virgin has a degree in anthropology and is at ease with an AK-47. How the AK-47 winds up on the ship is a story that doesn’t quite make sense and would ruin the plot if I told it.

But how Esther ends up on the ship is a bit more believable. Cargo ships occasionally take paying passengers. When she misses the boat she was supposed to be on, the bleary-eyed, but tenderhearted first officer, who reminds her a little of her father, takes pity on her.
Part Alien, part The Abyss, part Leviathan, The Ancient sometimes feels like a trash-compacted Hollywood thriller. But Gray has writing skill to burn, and enough talent to save it from an unrelenting, industrial bleakness. This may not be the book that puts her on the bestseller list, but it’s proof that she can churn them out. If King is keeping his eye out for a replacement queen, he could do much worse. :

The Ancient by Muriel Gray, Harper Collins, pb, 359pp, $22.95