The otherworldly inclined will enjoy raising their frequencies, connecting with the spirits, and reading this offbeat yarn.
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 entertaining—but still, to a skeptic, not entirely convincing—memoir 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 door—and 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 books—Stavis prefers them to electronics, since entities like to mess with technology—and 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 fear—the 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.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-265614-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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