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Saturday, October 24, 2009

RIP Challenge: Review #3


Ha! I bet you thought I'd forgotten I was even doing RIP challenge!!! *laughs* So anyway, I'm reviewing Will Storr Vs. The Supernatural.


As it turns out, Will Storr is also the author and an actual person in real life. A journalist, to be more exact, from the UK. Among the course of his real life carreer he has done many interesting things including training for jungle warfare with the British Army and spending a entire day with Ozzy Osbourne. His work has appeared in GQ, The Times, The Observer, The Weekend Australian and The Independent.

In the book you discover that Will Storr, along with being a journalist is a self-proclaimed (and proud of it) skeptic and cynic concerning the supernatural and religion and a champion of rationality. That is until he travels to Philadelphia to interview a "Demonologist" for an artilce. He travels to meet Lou Gentile (also a real, google-able person) expecting to meet and probably expose a crack-pot insane person and instead encounters an everyday central heating engineer who exposes Will to things that he can't rationally explain away.

Will's experience with Lou causes him to seriously question his aforementioned beliefs, or rather, lack thereof, and so he launches himself into a full out search for the truth about ghosts and the afterlife. His journey leads him to many haunted places, meetings with priests, mystics, mediums, and druids as he searches for ways to explain the things he has experienced and witnessed.. because you see... if there IS an afterlife.. then there must also be a heaven and angels and demons and all that. And if THAT'S the case.. well then Will has some serious work to accomplish before he dies. LOL

The book and Will's writing style brings the reader along with him and encourages them to loose themselves within the story to the point of experiencing his adventures with him. The part I love the most are his reactions to the "supernatural." There are no illusions of a brave man out to battle forces beyond his control. His reactions are totally human and understandable.. and of course hilarious. My favorite review of the book reads:

"Too funny to read in public, to scary to read on your own."

This is soooo true. I often find myself laughing out loud on nearly every page.. but there is sufficiently enough creepy to keep me from reading it alone in the dark. In either case, it's TOTALLY worth the read. Seriously, I can't think of even one person who wouldn't enjoy it, and in order to prove me wrong, you're still going to have to read it! *wink*

For now, here's a teaser of one of my favorite excerpts from the book:

As the EVP grumbles on, we all hear one single, loud thump coming from upstairs.
There's nobody there. I sit up rigid. That's it, now. I admit it. I am scared.
Really, very, very scared indeed. Deborah starts crying, softly. And then,
something touches my back.

When I think back to this incident, it's my
reaction that I remember most vividly. It wasn't: 'Ooh, did I just feel
something?' It wasn't even: 'Hang on, I'm sure something just...' It was: "Shit!
Fuck! Something just fucking touched my fucking back!" and I leapt out of my
chair......

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

ok this book sounds totally me. i like scary stuff, but i also like to be able to fall asleep at night, so that severly limits what scary things i can read.

i think i could handle this one.

Theresa said...

I like scary stuff too, but I can't usually do a whole lot of scary.. if it's slasher or torture serial killer type stuff, I don't even TRY. YECH..

What I love about the book is that the Author seems to be as much a coward as I am so his reactions are HILARIOUS and believable.

By the end you still don't really know for sure which view he takes, but I like that the book is objective like that.