The Unseen a parapsychology mystery eBook Alexandra Sokoloff
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From Thriller Award-winning author Alexandra Sokoloff A terrifying novel of suspense inspired by the world-famous ESP experiments conducted by Dr. J.B. Rhine in the Duke University parapsychology department.
After experiencing a precognitive dream that shatters her engagement and changes her life forever, young California psychology professor Laurel MacDonald decides to get a fresh start by taking a job at Duke University in North Carolina. She soon becomes obsessed with the long-buried files form the world-famous Rhine parapsychology experiments, which attempted to prove if ESP really exists.
As she teams up with another charismatic professor, they uncover disturbing reports, including a mysterious case of a house supposedly haunted by a poltergeist, investigated by another research team in 1965. The two professors and two exceptionally gifted Duke students move into the grand, abandoned mansion to replicate the investigation, unaware that the entire original team ended up insane... or dead.
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Reviews
"A creepy haunted house, reports of a 40-year-old poltergeist investigation, and a young researcher trying to rebuild her life take the "publish or perish" initiative for college professors to a terrifying new level in this spine-tingling story that has every indication of becoming a horror classic. Based on he famous Rhine ESP experiments at the Duke University parapsychology department that collapsed in the 1960s, this is a chillingly dark look into the unknown." -- Romantic Times Book Review, 4 1/2 stars
"Sokoloff keeps her story enticingly ambiguous, never clarifying until the climax whether the unfolding weirdness might be the result of the investigators' psychic sensitivities or the mischievous handiwork of a human villain."
-- Publisher's Weekly
"Alexandra Sokoloff takes the horror genre to new heights."
-- Charlotte Examiner
"Sokoloff shines, and deserves kudos for her crisp, direct style, excellent characterization, and for weaving the real life history of the Duke Rhine lab into her own fictional landscape."
-- Horrorworld
"Alexandra Sokoloff’s talent brings readers into the dark and encompassing world of the unknown so completely, that reader’s will find it difficult to go to bed until the last page has been turned. Her novels bring human frailty and the desperate desire to survive together in poignant stories of personal struggle and human triumph. But the truly fascinating element of Sokoloff’s writing is her deep dig into the human psyche and the horrors that lie just beneath the surface of our carefully constructed facades."
-- Fiction Examiner
"Sokoloff has provided a new and interesting twist to the genre, one that will stay with the reader long after the book has been read… the hair on the back of my neck may never lie down."
-- Bookreporter.com
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Author bio
Alexandra Sokoloff is the Thriller Award-winning and Bram Stoker, Anthony, and Black Quill Award-nominated author of the supernatural thrillers THE HARROWING, THE PRICE, THE UNSEEN, BOOK OF SHADOWS and THE SPACE BETWEEN, and the bestselling Huntress/FBI series (HUNTRESS MOON, BLOOD MOON). The New York Times Book Review called her a "daughter of Mary Shelley", and her books "Some of the most original and freshly unnerving work in the genre."
As a screenwriter she has sold original horror and thriller scripts and adapted novels for numerous Hollywood studios. She has written two non-fiction workbooks SCREENWRITING TRICKS FOR AUTHORS and WRITING LOVE, based on her internationally acclaimed workshops and blog
Alex is a California native and a graduate of U.C. Berkeley, where she majored in theater and minored in everything Berkeley has a reputation for.
The Unseen a parapsychology mystery eBook Alexandra Sokoloff
I have discovered Alexandra Sokoloff, whose debut novel THE HARROWING was okay, but it is her second novel THE UNSEEN that I want to tell you about.Everyone loves haunted house novels, and THE UNSEEN is a new take on the genre. My only (slight) criticism is that the protagonist, Laurel, keeps wanting to come up with rational explanations for what is obviously a real haunting.
The only question is: it the haunting a ghost or is it a poltergeist, brought on by the sexual tensions of two teenagers in the house?
THE UNSEEN is an intelligent, fast-paced read. It is a real haunted house novel that I highly recommend.
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The Unseen a parapsychology mystery eBook Alexandra Sokoloff Reviews
As a fan of ghost and haunted house stories I often have a hard time finding ones without gore. Since stories with hauntings or supernatural elements usually fall under the heading of "horror" and the words horror and gore seem to be synonymous in the literary world it sometimes happens that I buy a book that sounds like a book about ghosts and those who deal with them only to find myself knee-deep in attempts to gross me out with endless descriptions of just how much abuse and destruction a human body can be put through. When this happens I chuck the book in a rage of disgust and go back to reread Julian's House for the umpteenth time.
Now, you may be wondering why I'm telling you this since it has nothing to do with Alexandra Sokoloff's The Unseen. Well, as the old Grape Nuts slogan of the 1920s put it..."There's a reason"
The reason is that when, after reading the reviews and learning that this was a pretty pure haunted house novel with little to no gore I snapped it up eagerly, so excited to possibly add another favorite to my list...somehow it just didn't work out quite as planned.
While this WAS a ghost story with no gore I couldn't help but have the distinct feeling that the author either felt that writing romance was her real love, or that she was badgered by her publishers to "Add more sex. People BUY sex" and yeah, sure, they do...but with the internet they have the option of buying steamy romances or outright bow-chika-wow-wow hardcore so they DON'T need to buy ghost stories that seem more focused on describing the sexual tension and attraction of the characters than in getting into the spooky mystery.
For the first hundred pages at least, we were constantly treated to descriptions of the breathstopping attractions of hot/charming/irresistible Brendan Cody (seriously?) the professorial colleague with wild Irish charm and a mysterious secret. Shhhh!
This makes the heroine come off as an utter dolt whose main focus---oh and she's a professor of psychology, by the way, lord love us---is looking for sexual innuendo and romantic insinuations from every damned man she comes across in the book! From Tyler, a spoiled, charming student who always seems to make her blush (how old IS this chickie anyway?) to the aforementioned Brendan Cody, whose body heat distracts our horndog heroine every time she walks past the man/is in a room with him/thinks about him or sees him from a distance!
I mean REALLY. No interaction between these two can even occur without us being beaten over the head with the fact that the heroine is mad attracted to him and hearing about his "heat", and very few of her interactions with the psychic powerhouse of a student can occur without some sort of sexual interest or tension being mentioned.
And these people don't even GET to the haunted house until after the first hundred pages, after which we do have a few suspenseful moments courtesy the spook factor...but we also get two bouts of sex, more... oh so many more, references to Brendan's body heat as well as a few more opportunities to see Tyler's ability to make our adult heroine turn red and feel off center because of her response to his languid, feline charm---being Southern he is, of course, languidly charming in the extreme.
By the time the haunting started in earnest I was heartily sick of this "adult" professor who didn't have the womanly savvy to sit a jealous and resentful female student, called Katrina, down and spell out to her that this needless active hostility was a problem that could make it difficult to carry out an experiment that required living together in the same house for a month.
And since we're in a forgiving mood let us not be bothered by the fact that the whole Katrina hates Laurel subplot was confusing since the young girl's openly expressed resentment seemed based upon nothing other than the fact that Laurel was a female and a colleague of that old ladykiller Brendan.
The supernatural part, once it got going was disorienting and creepy, though hardly as unnerving as it should have been had the author spent less time reminding us that Brendan makes Laurel blush and tremble when Tyler isn't making her feel nervous and undressed and more time on the spooks.
Oh well (insert long sigh here) since gore-less ghost mysteries or supernatural thrillers aren't that easy to find I'll probably give Sokoloff's other books a try but for heaven's sake please, if your protagonists are supposed to be adults with advanced degrees in professions of responsibility, let them act like grownups rather than like hormone addled 15 year olds.
Sadly, for those reasons, I have to give this one 3 stars. Not the worst book I've ever read, but certainly not one I'd care to revisit.
For those who like supernatural suspense or Ghosts Without Gore I'd suggest Julian's House by Judith Hawkes, the Haunted Ballad Series by Deborah Grabien, or Barbara Erskine's Midnight is a Lonely Place or House of Shadows.
All these are books with protagonists in relationships but the relationship part isn't such a speedbump in the freeway of the spooky plot.
I liked the premise and the story that THE UNSEEN tells quite a lot. I felt that this novel suffered from some pacing issues. At times it seemed to really drag for me, and I just wanted to get to something happening. I think that parts of the story, mostly in the middle, could have been streamlined quite a bit.
But the ending made up for it. As it approached a climax, the pacing picked up and built to a perfect pitch as the story resolved. I felt like the ending was a little bit abrupt, and I found myself wishing I knew more about the direction the MC will take in her life. The whole tale brought to mind the movie "Poltergeist" for me in some respects, though it really wasn't similar in content (other than ghosts) to that story.
Unlike some other reviewers, I feel that one of Ms. Sokoloff's strengths as a storyteller is in building up her characters. I did not feel that any of them were cardboard cutouts; they were all well-developed in my view. I especially liked Lauren and Tyler, but I thought that both Ian and Katrina were well-done.
Because of the pacing issues, I can't give this 5 stars. Even 4 stars might be a bit high, but I'll stick with it. A solid "B" grade novel.
This is a disappointing book. It clearly aspires to be a HELL HOUSE or HILL HOUSE--scenes are directly lifted from both books, from the overtly sexual "ghosts" to the "pounding in the hallways" to the 2 men/2 women cast--but after a promising start...it just begins to drift.
I liked the set-up and the first 150 pages...but once the main character was settled at the university and began to explore the papers in the library, I realized that I had read 150 pages--and NOTHING had happened!
But I pressed on and the 4 characters move to the house...but what occurs simply isn't scary. At all. Like I mentioned, the author seems to be checking off scenes from HELL HOUSE and HILL HOUSE, but they lack tension, scares and that creep out factor those other two books provide in spades.
I have about 30 pages left but it has sat on the shelf for two weeks now. In other words, I "could put it down" since I haven't found it at all engaging.
So if you want a haunted house book, start with Shirley Jackson's THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE, which is the best in the business. Then watch the classic 1963 film by Robert Wise (NOT the remake!) Then read Richard Matheson's HELL HOUSE, which is a homage (as he admitted) to Ms. Jackson. Skip the movie, THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE. Even though the book and movie share the same crappy ending, the film leaves out the darkness of the book and isn't at all scary. Even though Matheson wrote the screenplay, he too was disappointed in the film.
I have discovered Alexandra Sokoloff, whose debut novel THE HARROWING was okay, but it is her second novel THE UNSEEN that I want to tell you about.
Everyone loves haunted house novels, and THE UNSEEN is a new take on the genre. My only (slight) criticism is that the protagonist, Laurel, keeps wanting to come up with rational explanations for what is obviously a real haunting.
The only question is it the haunting a ghost or is it a poltergeist, brought on by the sexual tensions of two teenagers in the house?
THE UNSEEN is an intelligent, fast-paced read. It is a real haunted house novel that I highly recommend.
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