This time, Wood's usual Lady Luckless is poor little rich girl Eve Klein, whose millions can't buy her relief from her other inheritance: the clairvoyant powers that have recently frightened off her husband, Sam. Wood's a seasoned hand who knows how to move even this silly stuff at a steady clip, but this thin outing must count as her least effort-and, for the reader, little more than bargain-basement diversion.Wood wrote three occult novels in the 80's (Amy Girl, 1987, etc.), but her current publisher is promoting her as the author of Twins (1977)-a telling comment on a sagging career that may lift a bit with this vivid if formulaic mix of occult and serial-killer chills. By now Levin is convinced that Amy's not your usual gal, so he stands aside as Uncle Jonathan, who's kept tabs on things, escapes the asylum and spirits Amy away. When in a most distasteful scene he brings matters to a head by leading a would-be gang-rape of Amy, she turns her power on full-blast and kills him and his drooling buddies. Wood steps up the narrative pace as Paulie and Amy duel, with their battle escalating as Paulie first steals Amy's possessions, then burns down a house she's inherited. Wood never adequately explains Amy's power (except through some mumbo jumbo about a substance X-the cold thing?-in Amy's body) and seems unsure about Amy's relationship to it does she control it, or it her? The power remains unknown to all but hapless Uncle Jonathan until Amy enters Levin's home and meets her nemesis: Levin's sociopathic son Paulie. Detective Joe Levin frees her from the closet and takes such a shine to her that he ends up adopting her but not until Amy gets back at Dad by visiting him in jail (he's been arrested for the killing) and mind-ordering him to attack a guard, who splatters Dad all over the walls. Fortunately, her clairvoyant Uncle Jonathan, inmate of an insane asylum, picks up the bad vibes and persuades his shrink to call the cops. Amy watches through the keyhole, and for the next two days, as she peers at Mom's decaying body, something cold and malignant grows in the closet with her. Why has horror author Wood-who proved capable of some originality in The Killing Gift, The Tribe, and Lightsource-decided to add to the brood of deadly children that litters post-Exorcist occult fiction by spawning yet another terrible tot? Particularly one whose powers of ''mental domination'' are as old hat as last decade's comic books? Eight-year-old Amy is the calamitous kid in question, introduced by Wood in the first of several violence/sex exploitation scenes by having her rummy dad lock her in a kitchen closet just before he beats her mom to death.

Amy Girl by Bari Wood