Necroscope
| Author | Brian Lumley |
|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Horror/Science fiction/Adventure novel |
| Publisher | HarperCollins |
| Published | 1986 |
| Media type | Print (Paperback) |
Necroscope is the title of a series of horror novels by British author Brian Lumley.
The term necroscope, as defined in the series, describes someone who can communicate with the dead (coined Deadspeak later in the series). Unlike necromancers, who here extract the knowledge they seek by brutal eviscerations of corpses, a necroscope can communicate with them as equals: peacefully and without any physical interference. The abilities of a necroscope are defined as a type of ESP.
Harry Keogh (born Harry Snaith) is born with the ability to speak to the dead. As he grows up and his power manifests itself, he befriends the dead. From them he learns that death is not the end, that although the body dies – the mind goes on, and the dead continue to improve and expand in death what they loved in life. From him, the once silent Great Majority learns to communicate amongst themselves, and love him for it. In turn, they offer him their knowledge: while at school, a deceased math teacher helps him with his developing mathematics talent and an ex-army sergeant teacher imparts self-defense skills.
As the years go by, he has recurring dreams about his mother, dead after an apparent ice-skating accident but in reality murdered by her husband and Harry's stepfather Victor Shukshin. Shukshin is a psychic sensitive, a defector sleeper agent planted in England by the Soviet E-Branch. In his self-appointed mission to avenge his mother's death, Harry is dragged into a web of espionage involving British and Soviet ESP agencies.
This leads to Harry learning to use the Möbius Continuum (from its discoverer August Ferdinand Möbius himself, at his grave in Leipzig, Germany), which allows him to instantaneously transport himself anywhere in the multi-dimensional universe.
From that point on, Keogh, backed by the British E-Branch, works to rid our world of a vampire menace, a mission that will eventually lead him to a parallel world, Sunside/Starside, the vampire-dominated world connected to Earth via two portals, one in Romania (the original "source" of vampires on Earth) and a second, recent one in the Soviet-run Pechorsk Project in the Urals. It is on Sunside/Starside that Harry Keogh's final death eventually meets up with him, after he has lost his family, his friends, even his deadspeak and numeracy... but not his humanity.
As Harry knows well – death is not the end, his was a success story and such stories need to go on. In the Möbius Continuum, Harry's essence explodes in a burst of golden light, and from that explosion a myriad of golden darts, each a part of Harry, come forth.
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