Buck Carlsbad's job takes years off his life--literally. A gifted medium, Buck acts as a ghost magnet, drawing evil spirits into himself to be neutralized but losing a bit of his own life each time. In the process, the "marks" draw him into a shadowy world of the dead that Buck terms the Blacklight, where he believes the answers to his parents' disappearance 30 years ago await him. Lately, the Blacklight voices have whispered that something big is coming. Then a rich executive asks Buck to go along as a spiritual bodyguard on the inaugural run of a bullet train that will change the face of American transportation, provided it survives passage through a deadly expanse of haunted desert that almost claimed Buck's life once before. Buck knows accepting the job could mean death, but he also knows returning to the desert is his best chance to find out what happened to his family.
Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan, the authors of the Saw film franchise, and Masters of Horror writer Stephen Romano pack their collaborative effort with enough psychotic spirits, bloody demises and double crosses to delight horror fans, as charismatic Buck finds himself hurtling into the maw of disaster, trapped and unable to trust any of his fellow passengers. Wry, complex and suspenseful, Black Light will keep spines tingling from the first ghoulish encounter to the final exorcism. --Jaclyn Fulwood, graduate assistant, University of Oklahoma Libraries