The Long Night of the Grave (1986) by Charles L. Grant

Approaching Charles L. Grant

Readers unfamiliar with The Long Night of the Grave may wish to read my notes only after reading the novel

The Long Night of the Grave is the strongest of Grant's "Universal Horror" trilogy. Perhaps this is due to the relative scarcity of mummy novels, even ones that merely transplant the location of 1930s films.

Like The Soft Whisper of the Dead and The Dark Cry of the Moon, The Long Night of the Grave takes place in nineteenth century Oxrun Station, CT. Long Night takes place in the early 1890s, the period of electric cars, electric light, and the World's Columbian Exhibition. Like the previous novels, Long Night deals with an outsider's arrival, the outsider seeking alliance with a powerful local family.

Our hero is John Vicar, a young and modest landowner. While acknowledged as an equal by the local bourgeois grandees, John has ambitious career plans: to own Oxrun's first car dealership.

But Vicar is also one of three men who purchased an Egyptian curio from a since-disappeared archaeologist named Reskin. John Vicar's friend Jeffrey Isle claims desperately that the three curios belonged to him, but he cannot afford to buy them back.

Soon the group who own the three curios find surrendering them to their original owner has become a matter of life and death.