My article "Chaos in Mali" is on ExpertsColumn. Below you can find a link to my favorite CD of Malian music and a link to the article.




"Chaos in Mali": http://expertscolumn.com/content/chaos-mali

Review: "The Fifth Harmonic" by F Paul Wilson

Famous for his Repairman Jack and The Adversary series of horror/adventure novels, Wilson morphs his keyboard into a Ouija to write this New Age quest romance.

                             

The Set-Up

Physician Wilbur Cecil Burleigh learns he has an aggressive cancerous tumor in his throat.  By chance he meets a former patient whom he did not expect to survive her cancer.   She claims a  New Age healer named Maya cured her.  Although extremely prejudiced against alternative medicine, Burleigh visits the mysterious healer Maya and seeks a cure through her on her terms.  She requires him to give away his money and travel with her to Central America to seek healing “tines” hidden by an unknown ancient civilization.  The tines are necessary for a cure.  He goes, but not without a “Kevorkian kit” to end his life if Maya’s cure doesn’t work.

My Take

Granted, the plot is an old one: guided by a magical or divine being, a hero goes on a quest to learn about the spiritual nature of death and mortality.  You’ve seen this story before in Book VI of Virgil’s “Aeneid” or in Dante’s “Divine Comedy” or, more trivially, in Captain Jack Sparrow’s quest for the Fountain of Youth in “Pirates of the Caribbean 4.”   I admire Wilson’s sense of invention for mashing up this old plot with “physician heal thyself” and a romance between middle-aged adults.  Wilson also gets plus marks from me for writing a New Age story without extraterrestrials, monsters, or ghosts.

Amazon reviewers rate this book across the full range of possible ratings.  Half the eighteen reviewers gave the book five stars, but the other half assigned ratings of one, two, three, or four stars.  This book with a monstrous but real antagonist--cancer--didn’t appeal to some fans of Wilson’s horror/adventure novels.

I suggest that Wilson’s fans who are disappointed with this book don’t recognize its genre.  Looking over the negative reviews on Amazon, I see readers of horror/adventure novels who are hungry for more.  They buy this book expecting it to be like his other novels, but it’s not.  This novel is a romance with man and woman who can’t stand each other at first ending up as a happy couple.  Thus, it’s a romance/adventure and more like a Louis L’Amour novel than a Michael Crichton book.  I have to confess that the romance element of the novel sneaked up on me.

Observations

• The romance, especially the sexual element of the romance, runs counter to popular notions of the attractiveness of terminal cancer patients (or of middle-aged people).
• Having a healer named Maya take the hero to the country of the Maya people of Central America causes some confusion with names.   
• F. Paul Wilson still practiced medicine when he wrote this book.  Even though this work is fiction, Wilson’s obvious interest in mind-over-matter medicine astonished me.
• Wilson did some small amount of research into Maya civilization for this book.  His references to the Maya people are respectful.  Some of Wilson’s Maya characters are suspicious of the healer, showing that you don’t have to be a scientist to distrust her.
• In my favorite scene in the novel,  Burleigh  shelters himself from rain and flooding alone in an ancient temple.  Many animals from the jungle--even some very large ones--also shelter themselves there.
• The novel does not attribute the mystical tines to the ancient Maya civilization, but to a mysterious pre-Maya people of Central America.
• No discussion of the end of the world in 2012 occurs in this book.   

Recommendation

Readers who don’t mind some adventure thrown into tales of spiritual quests or romances will enjoy this book.  If every book you like has an alien or a serial killer, stay away.

This review originally appeared on Triond's Bookstove site here.

A Puzzle Tough as Tentacles on Toast

Public Domain Image by Henrique Alvim Corrêa (1906). Source Wikimedia Commons.


A .pdf version of this puzzle appears on scribd.com here.
The puzzle has three parts: a clue list, a passage from a classic science fiction novel with words omitted, and a word search puzzle where all the words omitted from the passage are concealed. The object of the puzzle is to find all the concealed words in the word search puzzle and put them in the correct blanks in the passage. I designed this puzzle to have three levels of difficulty.

Clue List

Like a clue to a crossword puzzle, each word or phrase on the clue list suggests one of the words omitted from the passage. The clues are in the same order as the corresponding words omitted from the passage. For example, the fifth clue on the list corresponds to the fifth blank in the passage.

Word Search

Words concealed in the word search puzzle are written up, down, diagonally, forwards, or backwards.

The Dark Passage

The passage comes from a critical moment in a great science fiction novel, written long ago.

Levels of Difficulty

I've described the medium level of difficulty above.  For a harder puzzle, throw away the Medium Clue List.   Now try to work the puzzle.  I dare you.  For an easier puzzle, I've supplied an Easy Word List containing all the words omitted from the passage.  It's at the end of the answer section.  Tear off the Easy Word List from the answer section, turn it right side up, and use it to solve the puzzle.  Unlike the clue list, the order of the Easy Word List is scrambled.  Otherwise, the easy puzzle would hardly be a puzzle at all. 

Medium Clue List


(1) not deceased, (2) pertaining to the Roman god of war, (3) to picture in mind, (4) dreadfulness, (5) look, (6)  extraordinary, (7) yap, (8) sharp, (9) above your eye, (10) lack, (11) under, (12) ranking less high, (13) unceasing, (14) trembling, (15) Medusa or one of her sisters, (16) tempestuous, (17) weird, (18) weightiness, (19) soreness, (20) word specifying a type of attraction, (21) familiar planet, (22) fervency, (23) optics, (24) queasiness, (25) mushroom-like, (26) integument, (27) rhymes with celebration, (28) structural units of a symphonic work, (29) deep vertical holes, (30) planets 

Word Search



The Dark Passage






Answers

The Ghost

The Ghost

My little room

Filled with gloom, dread

And doom scares me,

And no key can

Let me outside,

For I died here

Inside this room. 

This bit of verse is an example of a chained than-bauk.  I learned about this form from an article by Lady Sunshine "Burmese Poetry: Than-Bauk."

The illustration is a public domain photo of "The Ghost of Oyuki" by Maruyama Okyo (1733-1795).

***

Today I posted a review of "We Aim to Please" by Tony Leather and Erin Miller on Amazon.  My article "Pied Piper Publishers," in which I exhort he general public to read and review more self-published and independently published books, graces Bizcovering.