Sister of darkness The chronicles of a modern exorcist

THE UNMAKING OF THE PRESIDENT 2016 By Lanny J. Davis. (Scribner, $25.) Davis, the consummate Washington insider and former special counsel to Bill Clinton, offers his take on the 2016 election. In his view, the former F.B.I. director James Comey's announcement, 11 days before the vote, that Hillary Clinton's emails were under investigation again, dealt the fatal blow, making the monster By Kathryn Harkup. (Sigma, $27.) Could Victor Frankenstein actually have succeeded in 1818, building a man out of spare parts? That was the year that Mary Shelley published her classic novel, and Harkup looks at the science behind the 19th-century culture of experimentation with dead bodies to which it was responding, sister of darkness By R. H. Staviš with Sarah Durand. (Dey St., $26.99.) Yes, there are such things as "secular exorcists." Stavis is one (along with being, fittingly, a screenwriter of horror movies). After helping what she says are thousands of people expel their demons, she has decided here to speak of her unique power, chicago By David Mamet. (Custom House, $26.99.) The combustible playwright and screenwriter turns once again to fiction in his fourth novel, set in 1920s Chicago among small-time crooks and aspiring mobsters. It has all the trademarks of a Mamet production - electric dialogue and a hurtling pace, close encounters with humankind By Sang-??? Lee. (Norton, $26.95.) Lee, a paleoanthropologist, tells us much about our evolutionary origins by sorting through our ancestors' mortal remains. Examining wisdom teeth from various periods, for example, she was able to establish how long ago our life spans first allowed us to know our grandparents. It hasn't been that long: only 30,000 years. "The selection of Min Jin Lee's PACHENCO as one of the Book Review's 10 Best Books of 2017 made me turn to the novel about four generations of a Korean family. While epic in scope - and, at nearly 500 pages, in scale - the book also makes vivid the quotidian details of its characters' everyday lives, from Sunja's visits to the 'fish broker' in Japanese-occupied Korea to the indignities suffered by Solomon as an aspiring Korean banker in 1980s Japan. The novel expertly portrays the rituals and mores specific to ethnic Korean culture even as it also poignantly captures the universally complicated relationships between family members, lovers and friends. The writing is spare and evocative: 'She could feel Noa's small hand when he was a boy, and she would close her eyes and think of his sweet, grassy smell and remember that he had always tried his best.' " - ROBIN POGREBIN, CULTURE REPORTER, ON WHAT SHE'S READING.

Of gonad-grabbing goblins, hard drive-erasing hauntings, and other such modern emanations from the pit of hell to keep a freelance, decidedly nonsectarian exorcist's appointment book filled.Mix a little churchly incense with some New Age ideas and perhaps some quiet Valley Girl talk, and the scene is set for this oddly entertainingbut still, to a skeptic, not entirely convincingmemoir by horror novelist and screenwriter Stavis (Adera: The Soul Stone, 2013, etc.), who, in her off hours, will do what she can to rid a client of supernatural squatters. We're not talking the William Peter Blatty, priest-out-the-window thing, at least for the most part, inasmuch as Stavis is not licensed to pack a cross and holy water. All the same, she claims an ability to see "entities" and to send them out the doorand there are plenty of entities to be chased off: "99 percent of people are walking around with entities now, totally oblivious to them," warns Stavis. Why blame bad bosses, marriages, vibes, and presidents when you can attribute the malaise to such entities? Well, take out your composition booksStavis prefers them to electronics, since entities like to mess with technologyand follow along: there are different kinds of apparitional critters out there, including Wraiths; Realm Walkers; Furbies; the Sandman, who "wants a very specific type of energy, and it has to be sudden, intense fearthe kind that electrifies you from your head to your toes"; the Crystal Dragon, which "appears as pieces of crystal as it floats through space"; Poofs, which "are just there, and they're never really a nuisance"; and "the smallest, least harmful entities out there," Clives, which "attach to you in an effort to suck as much of your energy as possible."The otherworldly inclined will enjoy raising their frequencies, connecting with the spirits, and reading this offbeat yarn. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.