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Showing posts from April, 2013

“Just Who are the Djinn?”: A review of Rosemary Ellen Guiley’s The Djinn Connection

 (New Milford, CT: Visionary Living, 2013), ISBN: 978-0-9857243-3-7 Exactly two years ago I reviewed The Vengeful Djinn: Unveiling the Hidden Agenda of Genies , a book co-authored by Guiley. This new companion book, subtitled “The Hidden Links between Djinn, Shadow People, ETs, Nephilim, Archons, Reptilians, and other Entities,” picks up where The Vengeful Djinn left off—with the possibility that the Djinn (often known by their Westernized name, genies ) are more active than many researchers have believed, and, indeed, may often be mistaken for the types of entities listed in the subtitle.             Djinn, which appear throughout the Quran, are composed of “smokeless fire” and reside in a parallel dimension to ours. It is said that they are highly intelligent, ancient (they helped to build Solomon’s temple), and eager to take the Earth back from the human race, which has usurped it. I refer readers interested in the complex social classes and habits and behavio

The Corruptions of the Gothic: A Review of The Luminous Memories of Alexander Vile

 by Tash Jones (available for Amazon Kindle March 25, 2013; www.tashjones.co.uk ) This debut novel from Masters student Tash Jones is a compelling mirror-glance journey into the effects of the Gothic novel on Victorian sensibilities. While both referencing outright and adapting subtle elements of Walpole’s Castle of Otranto , Stoker’s Dracula , Shelley’s Frankenstein , Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde , and Austen’s Northanger Abbey , The Luminous Memories of Alexander Vile concerns itself with pulling back the layers of appearance and looking at the arts and their relationship to the dark side of Victorian-era values (the novel’s events take place in 1892–93). Uses the standard Gothic conventions of diaries, letters, and narration, Vile is a mystery that is slowly pieced together, reading at times like the surrealism of Poe, with generous doses of the flowery, image-laden and complexly sytaxed prose of the time in which it takes place. It is a story of people who