Book dossier

The Mirror

by Marlys Millhiser

A young woman on the eve of her wedding sees her life turn into a nightmare of supernatural horror in which she is forced to break the most elemental of taboos. The mirror is a full-length looking glass in a grotesque bronze frame of talonlike fingers, brought from China to SanFrancisco in the late 1800's, and it's evil. When Shay gazes into The Mirror's depths on the eve of her wedding, she is transported back in time, awakening in the same house, but in another body, that of her grandmother, Brandy. And the independent, tempestuous Brandy is transported as well-from 75 years in the past into the present body deserted by her granddaughter, Shay. Plunged into a primitive, nineteenth century mining camp, condemned to a living hell of knowing the future and being forced to endure it unalterably, Shay finds herself marrying her own grandfather, giving birth to her own mother, and astonishing everyone by predicting the future-a future which is all too cruelly her own family past. As Shay struggles through the trials of her grandmother's life, Brandy awakens to the extraordinary destiny that now awaits her and discovers, in a stunning, eerie climax, that she can neither break nor defy the ancient, supernatural spell of The Mirror.