Black Helicopters

Nominated for a World Fantasy Award when originally published in shorter form in 2013, this short novel is set in a world convulsed by skillfully evoked cosmic horrors and populated by the semisupernatural agents fighting them. It spans the period 1966–2152 but takes place predominantly in 2012, in the wake of an invasion of Lovecraftian entities off the coast of Maine. Among those fighting to contain the invasion are Sixty-Six, the descendant of a victim of a CIA behavioral engineering experiment, and the psionically gifted albino Ivoire. She and her identical twin, Bête, have been tracked by Ptolema, an ageless espionage agent with inscrutable motives, to Dublin. As the narrative ping-pongs among different decades and various locales, sinister associations emerge that link the tale’s events and their players, heightening the mood of paranoia and conjuring a sense of mysteries whose solutions may ultimately be unknowable. Kiernan’s novella is well-wrought dark fantasy struck from the template of the black-ops thriller. (May)