Ghost Dance

June 28, 1999
Like his most recent (and most successful) thriller, The Purification Ceremony, Sullivan's fourth novel unfolds in rural America and features a strong Native American theme. There the resemblance ends, for there's little of Purification's eerie magic in this frustratingly roundabout suspense story tracking the sins of a dead priest in a Vermont town haunted by cross-cultural demons. Patrick Gallagher, a cultural anthropologist and filmmaker from Brooklyn, has come to the isolated Green Mountain community of Lawton to produce a documentary on an obscure parish priest who is being considered for sainthood. Father D'Angelo had healed 14 people during the 1918 Spanish influenza epidemic, before dying; his last words: "Pray for me. I am one of the damned!" Gallagher rents a cabin from beautiful recovering alcoholic Andromeda ("Andie") Nightingale, who happens to be a sergeant in the state police, and goes flyfishing--a means of distraction on the day he's turning 40 and his ex-wife is getting remarried. One "fish" he hooks turns out to be the mutilated corpse of a local dentist. This is the first of a string of murders that all point to a local sociopath calling himself Charun--a variant of the Greek Charon--who leaves notes alluding vaguely to Greek and Roman mythology and the Lawton river. The discovery of the journal of a Sioux woman describing the significant soul-releasing death ritual of the Ghost Dance holds clues to the murders, as does the ancestry of a disturbed former Lawton resident. Gallagher, who begins to have disturbing mystical dreams, aids Andie as she investigates--and tries not to fall off the wagon--and they tentatively embark on a love affair. Sullivan, however, allows little emotional engagement with these characters. Moreover, the plot veers wildly, with the Father D'Angelo documentary element introduced and then quickly abandoned until two-thirds of the way through, when it is hastily and improbably reactivated. The narrative suffers from inflated prose ("Are you afraid now?" the villain "wickedly" asks a damsel in distress), and even solid background on the Ghost Dance lore of the Sioux doesn't save it from hokum.