BW9: Frank Peretti

One of my favorite authors is finally releasing another book after a long six year wait.  Frank Peretti who wrote This Present Darkness and Piercing the Darkness, two ultra scary, chilling, spine tingling books about spiritual warfare has written Illusion which will be released March 6th.  

Synopsis:   Dane and Mandy, a popular magic act for forty years, are tragically separated by a car wreck that claims Mandy’s life—or so everyone thinks. Even as Dane mourns and tries to rebuild his life without her, Mandy, supposedly dead, awakes in the present as the nineteen-year-old she was in 1970. Distraught and disoriented in what to her is the future, she is confined to a mental ward until she discovers a magical ability to pass invisibly through time and space to escape. Alone in a strange world, she uses her mysterious powers to eke out a living, performing magic on the streets and in a quaint coffee shop.

Hoping to discover an exciting new talent, Dane ventures into the coffee shop and is transfixed by the magic he sees, illusions that even he, a seasoned professional, cannot explain. But more than anything, he is emotionally devastated by this teenager who has never met him, doesn’t know him, is certainly not in love with him, but is in every respect identical to the young beauty he first met and married some forty years earlier.

They begin a furtive relationship as mentor and protegee, but even as Dane tries to sort out who she really is and she tries to understand why she is drawn to him, they are watched by secretive interests who not only possess the answers to Mandy’s powers and misplacement in time but also the roguish ability to decide what will become of her. 

I discovered Frank Peretti back in the 1986 with the release of  "This Present Darkness" about evil trying to take over a small town and the battle not only with humans but angels and demons for their souls.  It's a gripping tale that will literally give you goosebumps as angels fighting amongst the humans with demons sitting on someone's shoulder whispering in their ears.  

Released 1986

"Ashton is just a typical small town. But when a skeptical reporter and a pastor begin to compare notes, they suddenly find themselves fighting a hideous plot to subjugate the townspeople—and eventually the entire human race. A riveting thriller, This Present Darkness offers a fascinating glimpse into the unseen world of spiritual warfare.When the fictional town of Ashton runs up against the sinister Omni Corporation, all hell breaks through - literally."

Released 1989

Peretti followed up in 1989 with the Piercing the Darkness: 

 "This sequel to Peretti's This Present Darkness is built upon fundamentalist Christian ideas. As it tells the story of Sally Roe, who goes from spiritualism to conversion, it also traces a battle to save a Christian school from demon-inspired litigation. The human activities are again overshadowed by the battle between angels and demons, whom the author takes quite literally, giving them names, personalities, and dialogue. They influence all human activities, just as human prayer helps angels and hampers demons."

released 1992

"A thriller that penetrates to the very heart of a vast struggle that threatens to tear our society apart. Successful news anchorman John Barrett is caught in a suspenseful moral and spiritual battle over the importance of Truth. Using all the elements of edge-of-your-seat fiction, master storyteller Frank Peretti weaves a prophetic tale of our times. John Barrett, top news anchor for Channel 6, knows something is wrong. The story doesn't add up. It couldn't have happened that way, and Barrett is determined to find the truth. Was his father's death really an accident? Or did he know too much? Another spine-tingling tale of deception, murder, and redemption."

Released 1995

"An ancient sin. A long forgotten oath. A town with a deadly secret.Something evil is at work in Hyde River, an isolated mining town in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest.

Under the cover of darkness, a predator strikes without warning-taking life in the most chilling and savage fashion. The community of Hyde River watches in terror as residents suddenly vanish. Yet, the more locals are pressed for information, the more they close ranks, sworn to secrecy by their forefathers' hidden sins. 

Only when Hyde River's secrets are exposed is the true extent of the danger fully revealed. What the town discovers is something far more deadly than anything they'd imagined. Something that doesn't just stalk its victims, but has the power to turn hearts black with decay as it slowly fills their souls with darkness."

Released 1999

"The sleepy, eastern Washington wheat town of Antioch has become a gateway for the supernatural-from sightings of angels and a weeping crucifix to a self-proclaimed prophet with an astounding message.

The national media and the curious all flock to the little town-a great boon for local business but not for Travis Jordan. The burned-out former pastor has been trying to hide his past in Antioch. Now the whole world is headed to his backyard to find the Messiah, and in the process, every spiritual assumption he has ever held will be challenged. The startling secret behind this visitation ultimately pushes one man into a supernatural confrontation that has eternal consequences."

Released 2005

 "Some monsters are real. Miles away from the hectic city, Reed and Rebecca hike into the beautiful Northwester woods. They are surrounded by gorgeous mountains, waterfalls, and hundreds of acres of unspoiled wilderness.During their first night camping, an unearthly wail pierces the calm of the forest. Then something emerges from the dense woods. Everything that follows is a blur to Reed-except the unforgettable image of a huge creature carrying his wife into the darkness.  Enter into deep wilderness where the rules of civilization no longer apply. A world where strange shadows lurk. Where creatures long attributed to overactive imaginations and nightmares are the hunters . . .and people are the hunted."

Released 2006

"Frank Peretti and Ted Dekker-two of the most acclaimed writers of supernatural thrillers-have joined forces for the first time to craft a story unlike any you've ever read. Enter House-where you'll find yourself thrown into a killer's deadly game in which the only way to win is to lose . . . and the only way out is in. The stakes of the game become clear when a tin can is tossed into the house with rules scrawled on it. Rules that only a madman-or worse-could have written. Rules that make no sense yet must be followed.

One game. Seven players. Three rules. Game ends at dawn."

If you like supernatural, psychological, spine chilling thrillers, be sure to check out Frank Peretti.  Just don't read his books alone or in the dark. :)   I've already preordered my copy of Illusion.  

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BW8: Fantastic Flying Books of Morris Lessmore

I was out of town all week visiting my parents and returned late Saturday. As you can imagine, I didn't have much time to come up with a long, exciting post, so leaving you with this video I found called The Fantastic Flying Books of Morris Lessmore. Enjoy!

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore from Moonbot Studios on Vimeo.


Sorry Gang. They must have changed this while I was on vacation.

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Link to your most current read. Please link to your specific book review post and not your general blog link. In the Your Name field, type in your name and the name of the book in parenthesis. In the Your URL field leave a link to your specific post. If you have multiple reviews, then type in (multi) after your name and link to your general blog url.

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BW7: Moby Dick

Do you know I have never read Moby Dick.   There are many classics I haven't read yet and looking at the 1001 books You Must Read Before You Die  I have a long way to go.  Check out the list - it is the fourth edition since the book was released in 2007 - see how many books you've read.   I've read a total of 31 books or 3% of the list so far.  Susan Wise Bauer also lists several of the same books in Well Educated Mind as great books to read. 

Have you discovered that the older you get, the more you understand and appreciate the classics.  With age, comes wisdom and with wisdom understanding.  Or maybe it's patience since these books take a lot more patience to read.  They are challenging to read, make you think and expand your mind.   Way back in high school, they were just something to get through because you had to.  Now I find myself reading them because I want to.   

So........    Are you ready to expand your mind?  We're going to tackle Moby Dick - literally and figuratively. Since we are looking 135 chapters and approximately 672 pages depending on whether your reading hardback, paperback or ebook, I recommend we shoot for 45 pages a day which will have us finishing in two weeks.  Join us in a read along of Moby Dick by Herman Melville.

Here's a taste:

CHAPTER 1

Loomings 

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago- never mind how long precisely- having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off- then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me. 

There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs- commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme downtown is the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land. Look at the crowds of water-gazers there. 

Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see?- Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster- tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone? What do they here?

But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling And there they stand- miles of them- leagues. Inlanders all, they come from lanes and alleys, streets avenues- north, east, south, and west. Yet here they all unite. Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses of all those ships attract them thither? 

Once more. Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries- stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever. 

But here is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadiest, quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley of the Saco. What is the chief element he employs? There stand his trees, each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix were within; and here sleeps his meadow, and there sleep his cattle; and up from yonder cottage goes a sleepy smoke. Deep into distant woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to overlapping spurs of mountains bathed in their hill-side blue. But though the picture lies thus tranced, and though this pine-tree shakes down its sighs like leaves upon this shepherd's head, yet all were vain, unless the shepherd's eye were fixed upon the magic stream before him. Go visit the Prairies in June, when for scores on scores of miles you wade knee-deep among Tiger-lilies- what is the one charm wanting?- Water- there is not a drop of water there! Were Niagara but a cataract of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to see it? Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a coat, which he sadly needed, or invest his money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach? Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all. 

Now, when I say that I am in the habit of going to sea whenever I begin to grow hazy about the eyes, and begin to be over conscious of my lungs, I do not mean to have it inferred that I ever go to sea as a passenger. For to go as a passenger you must needs have a purse, and a purse is but a rag unless you have something in it. Besides, passengers get sea-sick- grow quarrelsome- don't sleep of nights- do not enjoy themselves much, as a general thing;- no, I never go as a passenger; nor, though I am something of a salt, do I ever go to sea as a Commodore, or a Captain, or a Cook. I abandon the glory and distinction of such offices to those who like them. For my part, I abominate all honorable respectable toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind whatsoever. It is quite as much as I can do to take care of myself, without taking care of ships, barques, brigs, schooners, and what not. And as for going as cook,- though I confess there is considerable glory in that, a cook being a sort of officer on ship-board- yet, somehow, I never fancied broiling fowls;- though once broiled, judiciously buttered, and judgmatically salted and peppered, there is no one who will speak more respectfully, not to say reverentially, of a broiled fowl than I will. It is out of the idolatrous dotings of the old Egyptians upon broiled ibis and roasted river horse, that you see the mummies of those creatures in their huge bakehouses the pyramids. 

No, when I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast, plumb down into the fore-castle, aloft there to the royal mast-head. True, they rather order me about some, and make me jump from spar to spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at first, this sort of thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one's sense of honor, particularly if you come of an old established family in the land, the Van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes. And more than all, if just previous to putting your hand into the tar-pot, you have been lording it as a country schoolmaster, making the tallest boys stand in awe of you. The transition is a keen one, I assure you, from a schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it. But even this wears off in time. 

What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom and sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount to, weighed, I mean, in the scales of the New Testament? Do you think the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I promptly and respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular instance? Who ain't a slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old sea-captains may order me about- however they may thump and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way- either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other's shoulder-blades, and be content. 

Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of paying me for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single penny that I ever heard of. On the contrary, passengers themselves must pay. And there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But being paid,- what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition! 

Finally, I always go to sea as a sailor, because of the wholesome exercise and pure air of the fore-castle deck. For as in this world, head winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim), so for the most part the Commodore on the quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second hand from the sailors on the forecastle. He thinks he breathes it first; but not so. In much the same way do the commonalty lead their leaders in many other things, at the same time that the leaders little suspect it. But wherefore it was that after having repeatedly smelt the sea as a merchant sailor, I should now take it into my head to go on a whaling voyage; this the invisible police officer of the Fates, who has the constant surveillance of me, and secretly dogs me, and influences me in some unaccountable way- he can better answer than any one else. And, doubtless, my going on this whaling voyage, formed part of the grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a long time ago. It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo between more extensive performances. I take it that this part of the bill must have run something like this: 

"Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States.

"WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL."

"BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN." 

Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage, when others were set down for magnificent parts in high tragedies, and short and easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in farces- though I cannot tell why this was exactly; yet, now that I recall all the circumstances, I think I can see a little into the springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment.

Chief among these motives was the overwhelming idea of the great whale himself. Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all my curiosity. Then the wild and distant seas where he rolled his island bulk; the undeliverable, nameless perils of the whale; these, with all the attending marvels of a thousand Patagonian sights and sounds, helped to sway me to my wish. With other men, perhaps, such things would not have been inducements; but as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts. Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a horror, and could still be social with it- would they let me- since it is but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place one lodges in. 

By reason of these things, then, the whaling voyage was welcome; the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, mid most of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.

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BW6: D is for Dickens

Charles Dickens - February 7, 1812

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.  ~  Charles Dickens

 Happy 200th Birthday

In honor of Charles Dicken's birthday, me thinks we should read some Dickens.  I took a film and literature class a couple years back in which we compared and contrasted the book "Great Expectations" to the 1947 version of the film.  I quite enjoyed both and had fun picking out the differences in the film. The drama was so much more intense in the film version. If you watch the movies of Dickens' books, I highly recommend the earlier versions in black and white.  I prefer the old films over the new versions any day.  So much more intense.  Years and years ago I watched "Oliver Twist" and remember it scared the heck out of me and made me really sad,  but never read the book.  Now that I'm older and can appreciate the classics more and since we have the book on our shelves and Oliver Twist is #5 in Susan Wise Bauer's list of fiction to read in "Well Educated Mind" I'm just going to have to read it.  All of Dickens fiction, nonfiction, plays and short stories are available on line here, here and here.   

I challenge you to read one of his stories this month in honor of his birthday.   


ShaReKay of Lost in Kudzu is going mad for Dickens this month. Head on over to her blog and join her in reading "Bleak House" first.


Laura's Reviews who is hosting the 2012 Victorian challenge has dedicated the month of February to Charles Dickens. Be sure to check out her blog and see what everyone is reading. 


Check out the events here and here and here that will be taking place worldwide in honor of his 200th birthday.

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Get ready - We're going start "Moby Dick" by Herman Melville next Sunday.  Get a head start by reading "Why Read Moby Dick" by Nathaniel Philbrick.  It will give you interesting incites into the background of the story.

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