The Keep: the first chapter

What’s your reaction to the sudden shift in perspective on page 12, where there’s a first-person interjection (“…how I’m supposed to get him in and out of all these memories in a smooth way so nobody notices all the coming and going I don’t know”) into the third person narrative about Danny and Howie? How about when it becomes clear that this is a story about a story on page 18?

Read with Me in November: The Keep by Jennifer Egan

Join me during the month of November for Jennifer Egan’s The Keep. In her third novel, Egan (the author of The Invisible Circus, Look at Me, and Emerald City) writes of two cousins, reuinted at a medieval European castle, destined to relive a life-changing moment in their lives.

An Amazon.com review of the book calls it “wonderfully weird read–a touch experimental in terms of narrative, with a hefty dose of gothic tension and mystery–balanced by an intimate and mesmerizing look at how the past haunts us in different ways.”

Click here to read chapter one. Click here to reserve your copy of the book.

Thanks for reading Spook with me!

Thanks for reading Spook with me during the month of October!

To wrap up, did you find that the book influenced your beliefs in an afterlife or lack thereof?

Why is discussion and research about the existence of an afterlife important, or isn’t it?  

If you’ve read other books by Mary Roach, how did this one hold up to the others? Would you recommend it to friends? Why or why not?

If you are interested in more on this subject, try:

Ghost Hunters: William James and the search for scientific proof of life after death by Deborah Blum

Ghosts Caught on Film: photographs of the paranormal? by Melvyn J. Willin and Ghosts Caught on Film 2 by Jim Eaton

Occult America: the secret history of how mysticism shaped our nation by Mitch Horowitz

Possessions: the history and uses of haunting in the Hudson Valley by Judith Richardson

The Perfect Medium: photography and the occult by Yale University Press