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
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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