THE EXECUTIONER BOX

Hilton, whose last few tales have turned away from crime and detection toward something darker, takes a further step into full-on horror.

When he’s shopping at the stalls of curio dealers, Ben Taylor likes nothing more than getting a bargain he can mark up and resell at Taylor and King Curiosities, the shop he runs with his wife, Helen King. So he’s irresistibly drawn to a box offered by an elderly female traveler that contains a gold and bejeweled amulet he tells her is only gold-plated and paste. The amulet is indeed valuable, but the box itself, marked with indecipherable words in an unknown language, turns out to be far more consequential. When he attempts to open and clean it out, Ben is struck by a foul smell evidently emanating from a blackened tonguelike object inside that’s eager to inhabit and possess everyone who gets too close to it. The first victim is Jason Halloran, the rogue and thief who lives upstairs from Taylor and King, who suddenly and irrationally tries to strangle his girlfriend, drink and drug addict Belinda Sortwell. Shortly after Ben rescues Belinda from her boyfriend’s clutches, Jason’s found dead himself after apparently jumping from his fire escape. This horrific episode doesn’t end the carnage but merely launches the murderous spirit toward a new host who’ll repeat the pattern. Nearly every member of the tightly restricted cast—Ben, Helen, their part-time salesperson (Rachel Quinn), Helen’s mother, Gloria, and Cezary Nowak, the Polish fish-packer who lives upstairs from Jason—will be placed in mortal danger before Shay Connolly, an occultist specializing in demonology, drives the demon back into a safe place. Or does she?

A high-casualty nightmare right out of the Twilight Zone, more memorable for its parts than its whole.