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The Mills of the Gods book cover
The Mills of the Gods
2025
First Published
4.14
Average Rating
352
Number of Pages

A HARROWING SUPERNATURAL ADVENTURE, FULL OF COLOR, DRAMA, AND ROMANCE, AS ONLY TIM POWERS CAN DELIVER PARIS, 1925 HARRY NOLAN is an expatriate American, making a meager living as an illustrator for a low-paying magazine, but his life is upended when he is assigned to illustrate an anonymous article about the death of a god—because a centuries-old French brotherhood, the Sauteurs, are determined to suppress the story the article tells. The Sauteurs have burned the magazine’s office and killed the editor, and Nolan has the only surviving copy of the article. The author turns out to be a local writer named ERNEST HEMINGWAY, who—at first—tries to distance himself from the article and its lethal consequences. VIVI CHASTAIN is a rootless 19-year-old orphan who sustains herself by betting on horse races—aided by the spirit of the man she was in a previous life. But now that old identity is crowding her consciousness, threatening to push her own precarious identity into oblivion. It was her alcoholic occasional “stepfather” who told Hemingway the story about killing a god, and the Sauteurs are now aware of the story—and of her. The SAUTEURS maintain their identities past death through controlled reincarnation—when members die and are reborn, the brotherhood finds their newborn incarnations, kidnaps them, and raises them in special nurseries, where they can fully resume their previous lives. Vivi escaped from one of these nurseries when she was six years old, and so her previous identity has not yet consummated his possession of her. The Sauteurs want that consummation to happen—soon. GERTRUDE STEIN is the hub of literary and artistic Paris, and knows many of the city’s supernatural secrets. She has written a book that appears to be nonsense but which can be used to deflect the kind of psychic assault that threatens Vivi, and she becomes a Merlin-like mentor to Vivi and Nolan— —who find themselves reluctantly thrown together as hunted fugitives. Their struggles to evade the murderous Sauteurs and free Vivi from her increasingly intrusive previous self lead the pair to a mysterious hermit who lives in the towers of Notre Dame cathedral, and the haunted catacombs under Paris, and a confrontation with the Roman goddess Cybele in an other-worldly temple on an island in the Seine. In pursuit of a secret painting by PABLO PICASSO, they learn that the god whose death the Hemingway manuscript describes is Moloch, the child-devouring Phoenician god mentioned in the Bible—and that the Sauteurs make sacrifices to Moloch to maintain their reincarnations. From the narrow streets and rooftops of post-war Paris to, finally, a supernatural battle between gods in a remote village in Spain, Nolan and Vivi contend with forces natural and supernatural, enemies living and dead, and ultimately find themselves pitted against the god Moloch himself—at peril of their eternal souls. The Mills of the Gods is a harrowing supernatural adventure, full of color, drama, and romance, as only Tim Powers could tell it. At the publisher's request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management).

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Author

Tim Powers
Tim Powers
Author · 38 books

Timothy Thomas Powers is an American science fiction and fantasy author. Powers has won the World Fantasy Award twice for his critically acclaimed novels Last Call and Declare. Most of Powers' novels are "secret histories": he uses actual, documented historical events featuring famous people, but shows another view of them in which occult or supernatural factors heavily influence the motivations and actions of the characters. Powers was born in Buffalo, New York, and grew up in California, where his Roman Catholic family moved in 1959. He studied English Literature at Cal State Fullerton, where he first met James Blaylock and K.W. Jeter, both of whom remained close friends and occasional collaborators; the trio have half-seriously referred to themselves as "steampunks" in contrast to the prevailing cyberpunk genre of the 1980s. Powers and Blaylock invented the poet William Ashbless while they were at Cal State Fullerton. Another friend Powers first met during this period was noted science fiction writer Philip K. Dick; the character named "David" in Dick's novel VALIS is based on Powers and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Blade Runner) is dedicated to him. Powers' first major novel was The Drawing of the Dark (1979), but the novel that earned him wide praise was The Anubis Gates, which won the Philip K. Dick Award, and has since been published in many other languages. Powers also teaches part-time in his role as Writer in Residence for the Orange County High School of the Arts where his friend, Blaylock, is Director of the Creative Writing Department. Powers and his wife, Serena, currently live in Muscoy, California. He has frequently served as a mentor author as part of the Clarion science fiction/fantasy writer's workshop. He also taught part time at the University of Redlands. Excerpted from Wikipedia.

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