Teenaged boy Edward Parnassus, drawn into a savage world of international espionage, eventually transforms into "the world's deadliest and spookiest assassin."
What if one fine day you opened a mysterious package wrapped in brown paper and twine, postmarked Lisbon, Portugal, to discover a stack of blue notebooks and a bundle of yellowing pulp magazines ( Black Mask, Dime Detective, Chilling Adventures,&c), along with a brief letter from a stranger informing you that your recently deceased great uncle Edward, whom you never met in life or even knew existed, was in fact a dark, avenging pulp hero known as The Mime -- "the world's deadliest and spookiest assassin"? Would you plunge into reading the notebooks?
The Spine Chilling Adventures of the Mime is a literary mystery, a knowing homage to the great pulp spy/adventure stories of the '30's and '40's, and a tragic study of love, revenge and terror. It opens with the discovery of a family secret in a cache of yellowing documents and unfolds in a series of shocking revelations and tense action spanning the globe. It also deals in some depth with the occult. The Mime himself is an avenging pulp hero in the classic mold, like the flawed and tormented yet sympathetic figures in Dumas' The Man in the Iron Mask and Trevanian's Shibumi.