Road Of Skulls

[Amie Mandy]

WALLTOWNSHIP - Three human skulls appeared to be among the skeletal remains that were found at a property on Narrumson Road Tuesday, according to the contractor whose workers made the grisly find while working on the site.

Monmouth County Prosecutor Raymond S. Santiago and Wall Township Police Chief Sean O'Halloran have said a portion of skeletal remains were located on a property on the 1100 block of Narrumson Road while work was being conducted. They declined to give further details.

Authorities have shut down the site at least for the next few days, but Wiley, who has been in the business for 37 years, doubts the excavation by crime scene investigators will be completed in that time.

Peter Murcko, who has lived across the street from the site for 50 years, said the mood this past weekend over the new home about to be constructed was starkly different than it was after Tuesday afternoon. Murcko joined a ground-breaking party held by the new owners for the neighborhood on Sunday.

He said county-owned tandem dump trucks stood along the street Wednesday, picking up dirt from the site one after the other. He assumed it was carted off to be sifted through as part of the investigation.

Speculation about the remains have swirled around the neighborhood ever since they were found, he said. Were they connected to Prohibition days when rum-runners were known to frequent the area. Did the excavation disturb a Native American burial ground?

Jenna Caldern covers breaking news and cold cases in Monmouth and Ocean counties. Before coming to the Press, she covered The Queen City for Cincinnati Magazine in Ohio. Contact her at 330-590-3903; jcal...@gannettnj.com

The Road of SkullsOverviewCampaignEye of the Vortex

Mortal Empires

Immortal EmpiresClimateFrozenStarting factionDepends on campaignPropertiesSettlements4ResourcesDepends on campaignThe Road of Skulls is a Frozen province introduced in Total War: Warhammer II.

In Total War: Warhammer II, this province was previously 100% controlled by Har Ganeth at the start of a campaign. The Resurgent Update made Har Ganeth playable, and changed who controlled which settlements.

The Road of Skulls leads to Har Ganeth, the centre of Khaine worship in the Dark Elven empire. Ruled with an iron fist by Crone Hellebron, this is the only Dark Elven city where murder is outlawed for most of the year - the only blood spilt is done so in the name of Khaine, and sacrifice at his altar is the penalty for breaking this or indeed any law. Only on Death Night, when slaves and prisoners are let loose onto the streets, is the law lifted, and blood and wine flow equally as freely in a city-wide orgy of cruelty.

Har Ganeth is relatively isolated, reflecting the fact that it was originally built by Druchii generals after their defeat at the Battle of the Blighted Isle, refusing to go back to Naggarond so fearful were they of Malekith's wrath. It is an area particularly rich in chaotic influence - the Black Pillar is a towering shrine to the Chaos gods carved from obsidian and studded with the skulls of sacrifices. Sometimes it can be difficult to tell where the Khaine worship ends and the Khorne worship begins...

Completing the Eve Starkey trilogy, the sorceress finds that following the dictates of the New Management will lead her into a perilous trip back into the Ghost Roads lurking in her family home.

Over the first two novels of the Eve Starkey trilogy, Dead Lies Dreaming, and Quantum of Nightmares (the 10th and 11th books in the Laundry Files-verse), Stross gave us a view of life in England after the apocalypse from a perspective far removed from the titular Laundry Files organization. Eve and Imp Starkey, heirs to magical power and influence, over the first two novels dealt with Eve's boss, and the legacies of her boss, trying to escape the traps on several levels that Rupert has left his former assistant. Through these novels, we get introduced to a host of ideas, ranging from the mysterious Ghost Roads lurking in Eve's house, to the worst supermarket deli section ever committed to media

Now, in Season of Skulls, a capstone to this trilogy within the Laundry Files-verse, Eve must deal with the wishes of the New Management directly for the first time. And what they want is deceptively simple. They want the head of Rupert, who is not dead, but very much alive.

The problem is, to stop Rupert's latest schemes, Eve will have to reenter the Ghost Roads and face him and his plots in a 19th century England that never was, but could very well influence the present. And try and escape a geas that Rupert puts on Eve. Rupert is a planner and has been planning things for a very long time. He is totally a Leverage style Mastermind and Eve will have to gain allies and use all of her cunning and dare to stop him from...

While the first two novels had a balance between Eve and Imp in terms of screen time and narrative, Season of Skulls is very much Eve's story. Fans of Imp and his little gang of supervillains are not going to find much traction here. On the other hand, this novel's much more precise focus on Eve and her travails gives the author a chance to really develop her as a character.

The heart of the book, where most of the action takes place, is in the Ghost Roads first seen in Dead Lies Dreaming. Eve does not go to Whitechapel 1888 London in this venture into the Ghost Roads to stop Rupert and his schemes (and the whys and hows she chooses to go there and her gambits, are secrets for the reader to uncover (quaerendo invenietis!). But once she is there, Stross introduces a kaleidoscopic magical alternate version of 1816. Some of it is really clever on its own, with motifs and references and ideas taken from a variety of genre ideas and being mixed together wonderfully.

But the real piece of invention is The Village. Yes, THAT Village, the one with the big weather balloon and Patrick McGoohan trying to escape from a succession of Number Twos. What in the world is The Village doing in 1816? That WOULD be telling. Stross is a clear fan of the series and not only uses the setting, but also happily lifts dialogue and imagery from the series. (what the fantasy version of Rover is, in this Village is BRILLIANT and I want to steal it for a RPG scenario somewhere). Our Eve is of course dubbed Number Six. As far as who Number Two is, much less Number One, the answers will not surprise the clever reader. But they are...

And then there is the other mainline of this 1816 ghost road dreamverse, the Regency Romance portion. As longtime readers of the Laundry Files are well aware, Stross introduces a variety of subgenres and tropes into the various Laundry Files novels. It's a way to keep things fresh, its a way to allow him to write different books in the same universe, its a way to explore an ever more complicated and complex universe from a perspective far beyond the original concept of a IT nerd getting roped into facing Cosmic Horrors.

So the Laundry Files has had, by my reckoning, done spy novels in a couple of different flavors, vampires, superheroes and supervillains, corporate dystopia, and straight up Urban fantasy sorcery in the Eve Starkey books themselves. Here, in this Ghost Road 1816, Eve finds herself in a narrative, in a story, one she recognizes and has to fight the conventions of, and work with the conventions in order to stop Rupert. I am not a heavy reader of Regency Romance, having read only one example of a pure Regency Romance book (and it is itself a deconstruction of some of the tropes), although I have read authors who have borrowed from those tropes before, notably Mary Robinette Kowal. Here, Eve's immersion into those tropes comes with her recognizing and commenting on the tropes all along the way, so that even the most casual of readers can recognize what is going on, with the meta-commentary running in Eve's head.

There are lots of fun references and ties to the other novels, including a return of one of my very favorite secondary characters in the entirety of the Laundry Files-verse, Persephone Hazard. Persephone is basically Stross' tribute to the character of Modesty Blaze. (Persephone's former code name was Bashful Incendiary (get it?)) and a potent sorceress with her own agenda that also made me think a bit of McGoohan's David Jones. In this novel, under the New Management, she has been given a title and no little responsibility under his dread Majesty. She's doing well, as well as anyone can in this new Britain, anyway.

In terms of worldbuilding, Stross has a lot of fun and expends a lot of energy on not only the 1816 Ghost Road-verse, but the whole concept in general. The idea was sort of there in the first novel and we get Eve, Imp and company delving into the dangers of that place. But aside from places to hide dread books, what GOOD is the Dream Road-verse? What can it be used for? Stross explores these ideas winningly here, and I was reminded in many ways of the work of Borges, and of William Gibson's The Peripheral, among others. Even if the realm that Eve and Rupert are contending with is not the "real world" but does it have potential impact on the real world? Absolutely. It helps make what Eve and Imp have been doing as caretakers of the House (and their entrance to that world) all the more important and serious for the potential for mayhem and mischief if a sorcerer of power, such as Rupert, might get up a scheme to go into the past via the Dream Roads. What Rupert winds up trying to do, as mentioned as a Mastermind, makes him a well rounded villain, with quite a scheme up his head. A scheme that will not only involve Eve but also...

There is also more background to the entire universe, that helps clear up the whole timeline of why The Magic Went Away and how The Magic Returned. With this volume, the sequence of events from about 1800 to the present is now very much clarified for those who really are curious about the grand arching history of the Laundry Files universe and how it got to be in the shape that it is in.

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