Moore's interests, even in his comic mood, have always tended toward the dark side of human events—terrible temptations, for example, that force a character's will to the edge of a cliff. In earlier novels, he has dealt directly with the surreal and the supernatural—in The Great Victorian Collection, a young man awakens in a California motel to find that he has dreamed into existence a huge assortment of Victorian objets d'art, and in Fergus, the Irish-born writer of the title must confront a motley gang of ghosts from his past—but in most of Brian Moore's writing, one is always aware of larger, and darker, worlds lurking just out of view.

In Cold Heaven, the world of the supernatural arrives in a burst of brilliant light that dazzles—and awes and frightens—the readers as well as the characters. (p. 3)

Cold Heaven is that most desirable...