Review written for ClubReading.com by Susan
Irene and Hugh meet in the parallel world they have separately discovered, and each of them holds a unique key: Irene often finds the entrance closed to her but can always get out; for Hugh, the opposite is true. Neither understands why they have found the cobbled streets and eternal cold twilight of Tembreabrezi, the town on the mountain, where Irene has been visiting since childhood, always compelled to return to the enigmatic people she has grown to love there. But now the refuge is horror, and the two are asked to go on a quest or perhaps they are being sacrificed; there is no explanation or help, and the accumulating dread will not end with the deed’s accomplishment. Thus the contemporary world with all its trash and garishness becomes the place of safety and hope. Nonetheless, you will find yourself yearning with all your heart for that twilight world in the high, cold mountains, however monstrous its people might have become.
EXCERPT FROM The Beginning Place:
The Master, or mayor of Tembreabrezi was a spare, swarthy man with a hawk nose and dark eyes. He wore black, rusty, neatly-mended, homespun black trousers, vest, and jacket. A harsh man, a dark man. She had loved him since she first saw his face.
He brought her out of the hall into his offices, where a fire burned and the curtains were drawn as if against the grey of a day of winter. He set her a chair, and aided by the dignity of her clothing, the dark-red skirt and homespun blouse that Palizot kept for her, she sat down without awkwardness. He stood beside the high desk where he worked standing -he was a man one seldom saw sitting down -and turned his intense look on her. She drew a deep breath and held herself quiet, her hands in her lap.
“It has been a long time, Irena.”
“I could not come.”
“The way-?”
“I could not-find-” Nor could she find the words she needed. “The place,” she said, and then remembering what they called the stone arch in the wall of the manor, “The gateway. It was shut.”
“You could not walk on the road,” he said, not impatient with her stumbling, but dauntingly intent.
“When I-when I could come to the road, I could walk on it. But at the beginning-” She stuck again.
“You were afraid.” His voice was gentle; she had never heard him speak so gently.
“When I came through the gateway. It had been so long. And there, at the beginning place, beside the river, there was-”
He said a word, almost in a whisper. It was the word little Vitri had shouted when he was playing monster and she would not fall down, and Aduvan had scolded him, Shut up, don’t say that, both children over-excited, near tears. A huge, pale, deformed arm groping out across the grass-
“A man,” she said. “A stranger.”