The Lovely Bones

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold is a story centering around a fourteen-year-old girl, Susie Salmon, who is raped and murdered near her home in the 1970s.  She narrates the story after death, as she watches over her family and keeps tabs on her killer from her heaven.  She follows each of her family members as they deal with her death, each in very different ways.  She follows Ruth, a classmate who felt her presence as she passed through a parking lot from this world to the next and whose life is never the same from that moment on.  She follows Ray Singh, another classmate who was in love with her - her almost and only romance.  And she follows the man who took her life.

Rape is difficult for me to read, and it's even more awful to me in this book because of Susie's young age and the gruesome way in which she dies afterward.  Sebold treats this delicate subject matter well, though; perhaps because she herself was a victim of rape.  The scene isn't drawn out, and we get only those details which are vital to the understanding of the story.  So to anyone wary of picking this up because of this topic, I would at least give it a go, because the reading of it isn't as bad as I anticipated.  Of course, you may end up not being able to get through it, but trust me - at least try, because it's really an extraordinary book.

Speak with the Dead

Speak with the Dead:  Seven Methods for Spirit Communication by Konstantinos is exactly what it sounds like - kind of a how-to manual on communicating with the dead.  He outlines seven different methods, detailing what kind of equipment would be needed, if any, and what kinds of results one could expect.  He also talks about his own experiences with using these methods.  The methods themselves start out with the "easiest" and most well-known - using a tape recorder to capture electronic voice phenomena, or EVP, and increase in involvement or difficulty until you get to the seventh method, holding a séance.  He also provides a list of suggested further reading on the subject of spirit communication, and directs the reader to his website for some of the audio and visual samples he's collected himself.

I know this is a kind of book that people will give you side-eye for reading, but I'm really interested in this kind of thing, and I absolutely believe in the existence of an afterlife and ghosts.  Do I believe all of the descriptions of the afterlife Konstantinos has claimed to receive from the dead?  I take it with a grain of salt.  It sounds reasonable, but it seems unlikely for someone to get such detailed information like this.  Of course, he has been doing this for quite a long time now, and I haven't seriously tried it for myself, so what do I know?  Most of my knowledge of spirit communication is from watching the TAPS investigators on Ghost Hunters and Ghost Hunters International, which is a little different.  They use only the scientific methods, which Konstantinos begins with in the book, but the later chapters deal with more spiritual methods that rely heavily on your mental focus, such as scrying and telepathy.