Below is a review of my novel "SPOOK: Confessions of a Psychic Spy" by my colleague Beauregard Freidkin of the Midnite Review. I was counting on a good review from him by virtue of the fact he had read and endorsed my book. However, when I read the very first sentence of the review, I got a little queasy. Then it turned into my best review ever. Very glad. I worked hard on this.
BOOK REVIEW
By Beauregard Freidkin
While at first glance of the book cover - an angry Black man holding a smoking gun behind the title Spook - you may gasp at the political incorrectness and dismiss it as a blaxploitation version of a genre thriller. But if you did, you would be so wrong. "SPOOK: Confessions of a Psychic Spy" is so much more than just a spy novel with a paranormal twist. It's a meditation on racism, the duality of man, and lose of innocence. This novel is social commentary at its highest level disguised as science fiction.
The protagonist, John, is an African American who is a powerful remote viewer. He is also a tragic creation of the author's in that John, although used by the CIA as a psychic spy, is despised and hated by the men he works for. At the same time, because of John's clandestine alliance with the government, Black men and women of the period - shoeshine boys, maids, bathroom attendants, the labor force of America - sensing his difference, fear him. John is an outcast at every turn whose only acceptance ironically comes from the foreign psychic spies he is pitted against across Europe and behind the Iron Curtain. Conjointly, this Cold War era is also the decade of the Civil Rights and Peace movements, as well as the Women's Liberation movement, adding to the unpredictable powder keg of a setting.
The author, Carlton Holder, promises a series of books taking our tormented hero through the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties, right up to the end of the cold War. I can't wait to see how John changes and is changed by an America in upheaval. Thanks for something different.
http://www.brooklynapachepress.com/spook.html
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