Dancing With The Midnight Mare - Paperback

by Luca Collins (Author)

Tara Winslow, living in Australia, in this century is haunted by nightmares caused by her parents' impending divorce. Bron, a twelve year old boy in the last years of WW2, is trying to stay alive in Nazi occupied Poland. Their stories alternate with each chapter, along with a young SS corporal and the second most powerful man in Germany, the occult obsessed Heinrich Himmler.

Eighty years later Bron and Tara meet. Bron, now a distinguished child psychologist gives Tara the mythic story that kept him alive in a labour camp. Tara takes the old man's story to heart and begins to set up an elaborate series of rituals to conjure "the 'white horse that saved me." Together with her brother Cory she will call upon the horse to save her parents' crumbling marriage but her parents are not to know. Her attempts create chaos in a house already wracked with discord.

Her mother Kate tries desperately to understand her daughter, deciding to confront the old doctor, only to find he has died. Then one night she wakes to find her daughter standing in their yard placing a bridle into empty air. Tara, for her part, sees that the beautiful white mare she has willed into existence, has finally appeared beckoning her into a landscape of prophecy and danger.

Kate cries out as Tara and the horse disappear into the moonlit bushland toward the temple she has built in the nearby quarry at the top of a precipice. Kate, Ray and Cory race to save her.

This is a hybrid genre combining a number of story threads. It is one-part war story, one-part adolescent rites of passage, one-part magic realism centred on the struggle between white and black magic. Equally it is a psychological mystery that unfolds revealing and revelling in the power of belief and the ability to bring forth the seemingly supernatural. Both Bron and Tara are caught up in worlds that are powerful and inexplicable. Bron in a world in which the occult is conspiring against him and all of civilisation. For Tara it is a mystical world that she wants to control using willpower and ritual.