Dust of Eden

Rating:
Summary: HOPE THERE'S A SEQUEL
Review: East of Baghdad and West of Bastra exists a circle of ochre dirt guarded by three men who regard the site as the location of the Garden of Eden. Soldier of fortune Clayton Kenyon gathers a small force to steal the sacred dirt, but he dies in the attempt. A survivor sends the dirt to Kenyon's next of kin pretending it is his ashes. Many years later an elderly embittered Ariel Kenyon Leppa decides to commit suicide. However, before killing herself she uses the euchre sand that she thinks is Kenyon's ashes to paint a portrait of her daughter Amber when the child was nine years old.

When the paint dries, nine year old Amber comes to life and the forty five year old Amber confined to a wheelchair suddenly dies. A year later Denny Bryce seeks a decent nursing home to keep his father safe when he passes the Kenyan New Eden Assisted Living Center. It looks perfect as the residents seem like a family and the owner Ariel Leppa appears to be a caring person. He doesn't know that she painted residents into existence, old enemies who hurt her when they were alive. Now she uses the magic paint to turn them into whatever she wants.

THE DUST OF EDEN is a horror novel that is so scary readers will sleep with the lights on for weeks after finishing this book. No one should have the kind of power Ariel does over the lives of people she brought back from death and she is so warped and evil even her own daughter isn't safe from her. There are no heroes in Thomas Sullivan's creation only a very vicious villain and pathetic victims.

Harriet Klausner

Rating:
Summary: scary horror novel
Review: East of Baghdad and West of Bastra exists a circle of ochre dirt guarded by three men who regard the site as the location of the Garden of Eden. Soldier of fortune Clayton Kenyon gathers a small force to steal the sacred dirt, but he dies in the attempt. A survivor sends the dirt to Kenyon's next of kin pretending it is his ashes. Many years later an elderly embittered Ariel Kenyon Leppa decides to commit suicide. However, before killing herself she uses the euchre sand that she thinks is Kenyon's ashes to paint a portrait of her daughter Amber when the child was nine years old.

When the paint dries, nine year old Amber comes to life and the forty five year old Amber confined to a wheelchair suddenly dies. A year later Denny Bryce seeks a decent nursing home to keep his father safe when he passes the Kenyan New Eden Assisted Living Center. It looks perfect as the residents seem like a family and the owner Ariel Leppa appears to be a caring person. He doesn't know that she painted residents into existence, old enemies who hurt her when they were alive. Now she uses the magic paint to turn them into whatever she wants.

THE DUST OF EDEN is a horror novel that is so scary readers will sleep with the lights on for weeks after finishing this book. No one should have the kind of power Ariel does over the lives of people she brought back from death and she is so warped and evil even her own daughter isn't safe from her. There are no heroes in Thomas Sullivan's creation only a very vicious villain and pathetic victims.

Harriet Klausner

Rating:
Summary: A GEM WITH MANY FACETS
Review: I read this book because it had so many different summaries that I thought there must be a lot to it. There is. I don't suppose my summary is going to catch it all either but here goes. A soldier of fortune who abandons his family in WWII flies a surplus helicopter for tourists and oil riggers about the time of the revolution in Iraq. He stumbles on a patch of sacred sand guarded by fanatics. When he is killed in a firefight, his partner sends his ashes, indistinguishable from the red sand, to his daughter in the States. Half a century later, the daughter (Ariel Leppa) is an old eccentric painter who still lives in the family's farmhouse, which has tunnels left over from Indian wars and the booze-running days of Prohibition. All this sets the scene for the dramatic night of Ariel's suicide attempt.

She has led an unhappy life as a second-hand Rose, and now her "friends" are dead and her daughter is crippled from a climbing accident. In a symbolic act she mixes the ashes of the father who abandoned her into a final painting of her daughter as she was at age 9. The daughter (Amber) comes to life. Ariel then brings back the whole gallery of people who underestimated her and makes the farmhouse a literal assisted-living facility where she controls life and death and health and everything else. This builds through each of her relationships, including her former husband, her boss and the man she really loved who jilted her. A high school teacher who doesn't want to warehouse his Alzheimer father (Martin) in the usual facilities becomes convinced the informal farmhouse community will work for his reclusive father and manipulates his way in by insinuating that he will draw attention to the facility.

Things go horribly wrong when Amber steals the red paint and hides it in a cupola on the roof where she begins to make her own amateurish renderings. Her child's imagination brings unholy things to life -- a scarecrow, a dog, birds, vermin to punish people she doesn't like. The fields and the old tunnels become infested and the farmhouse comes under siege. Mother and daughter are at war using the devices of their mismatched powers. The mother uses subtle, insidious weapons -- an old pet brought back, a second child companion exactly like Amber but threatened with extinction if she doesn't get the paint returned. The daughter creates overt monsters. Played against this are a half dozen other dramas: illusory and impossible love affairs, revenge, vanity, Martin's haunted past and his mistaking Amber for his own dead daughter. There is pathos and heroism in the final resolutions and an ending that could be an ending or not. Given the power that is unleashed in this story, there is nothing that isn't redeemable so long as the power still exists. Fans may clamor for a sequel of this one.

What doesn't come through in this plot summary is the writing skill. Sullivan's style is certainly among the best.

Rating:
Summary: A GEM WITH MANY FACETS
Review: I read this book because it had so many different summaries that I thought there must be a lot to it. There is. I don't suppose my summary is going to catch it all either but here goes. A soldier of fortune who abandons his family in WWII flies a surplus helicopter for tourists and oil riggers about the time of the revolution in Iraq. He stumbles on a patch of sacred sand guarded by fanatics. When he is killed in a firefight, his partner sends his ashes, indistinguishable from the red sand, to his daughter in the States. Half a century later, the daughter (Ariel Leppa) is an old eccentric painter who still lives in the family's farmhouse, which has tunnels left over from Indian wars and the booze-running days of Prohibition. All this sets the scene for the dramatic night of Ariel's suicide attempt.

She has led an unhappy life as a second-hand Rose, and now her "friends" are dead and her daughter is crippled from a climbing accident. In a symbolic act she mixes the ashes of the father who abandoned her into a final painting of her daughter as she was at age 9. The daughter (Amber) comes to life. Ariel then brings back the whole gallery of people who underestimated her and makes the farmhouse a literal assisted-living facility where she controls life and death and health and everything else. This builds through each of her relationships, including her former husband, her boss and the man she really loved who jilted her. A high school teacher who doesn't want to warehouse his Alzheimer father (Martin) in the usual facilities becomes convinced the informal farmhouse community will work for his reclusive father and manipulates his way in by insinuating that he will draw attention to the facility.

Things go horribly wrong when Amber steals the red paint and hides it in a cupola on the roof where she begins to make her own amateurish renderings. Her child's imagination brings unholy things to life -- a scarecrow, a dog, birds, vermin to punish people she doesn't like. The fields and the old tunnels become infested and the farmhouse comes under siege. Mother and daughter are at war using the devices of their mismatched powers. The mother uses subtle, insidious weapons -- an old pet brought back, a second child companion exactly like Amber but threatened with extinction if she doesn't get the paint returned. The daughter creates overt monsters. Played against this are a half dozen other dramas: illusory and impossible love affairs, revenge, vanity, Martin's haunted past and his mistaking Amber for his own dead daughter. There is pathos and heroism in the final resolutions and an ending that could be an ending or not. Given the power that is unleashed in this story, there is nothing that isn't redeemable so long as the power still exists. Fans may clamor for a sequel of this one.

What doesn't come through in this plot summary is the writing skill. Sullivan's style is certainly among the best.

Rating:
Summary: HOPE THERE'S A SEQUEL
Review: I've read two other books by this author, but I think I like this one the best. It's a really creepy setting in an old folks home, but almost everyone in it used to be dead except this old woman painter who runs it. Her daughter is also made younger and she accidentally learns how to do what her mother does. She is only 9 years old and the things she creates are extremely scary. There is also a really sad old man in the home. The relationships between the characters are very involved, and the little girl and the old man become kind of heros in the end. Excellent book!
Avid Reader in Allentown, PA

Rating:
Summary: disappointing
Review: In DUST OF EDEN, an old woman discovers a jar of dust that has the gift of life, and she uses it to control those around her. This soon causes problems when others gradually begin to realize her secret.

This novel was something of a disappointment, as good as the writing is. Though it does generate a good amount of suspense and shock, I expected something a little more philosophical from this Pulitzer prize-winning author than this glorified Twilight Zone episode. Instead of dealing with the issue of the soul or what the afterlife is like (which this novel clumsily sidesteps), it degenerates into a battle of wills between people over the dust. The middle part, especially, lacks credibility, and the ending leaves some plot threads hanging (what happened to the spiders?). A big disappontment, but decent entertainment, nevertheless.

Rating:
Summary: thumbs up on this one
Review: It just came out and I read it in two days. I usually read a book a week, mostly mystery, science fiction or horror. I'm not exactly sure which category to put Dust of Eden. It's just a good thriller with a lot of fantasy and solid characters. Very real feeling for such a bizarre setting and story. I think any reader would like this.

Rating:
Summary: EC Comics Live Again
Review: The old classic horror comics were filled with stories of art that comes to life. That theme is used in this novel. In the Mid-East there is a small guarded crater. It is filled with a red dust. Legend has it that people from the stars came and created man and that the dust is a residue left behind. Some of this dust is stolen for the sole reason that it is guarded. A sample winds up in a funeral urn and is forgotten for many years.

The urn is in the hands of an old widow looking to commit suicide. For some reason she decides to paint one last painting and mixes some of what she thinks are her husbands ashes into the paint. The picture is a portrait of her paralyzed daughter long before her accident. Too tired to follow through on the suicide, she goes to sleep and is awakened by her now-young daughter.

The old woman puts suicide on a back burner and decides, instead, to paint other portraits of people missing from her life. Years later they are living with her on her old farm which is disguised as an assisted living facility.

Enter our protagonist, a professor trying to deal with a father losing his memories. For some reason he thinks the farm is a good place for his father and forces him in.

The farm is a strange place. The father is the only one who does not belong, not having been painted to life by the old woman.

What follows is really not all that interesting. The young girl steals some paint and accidentally creates some soulless monsters. Another of the resurrected is convinced by a voice from the other side to paint the serpent in a painting of Eden. The old woman becomes somewhat power-hungry when she realizes that the risen will not act the way she would like the to.

In the end very little is resolved. One has to wonder where all of the monsters are now (I suppose a sequel is possible). But ultimately I found myself wondering what the point was. We learned very little about most of the characters and those that we did learn about were not interesting. The father-son story could have worked better if the son had some rationale for sticking his father in the farm (he never checked medical facilities or anything else that a supposedly caring son would want to know). The one thing the son does seem to know is that the farm is not all above board (so why does he put his father there?). The reverse Dorian Gray idea was a little interesting but never developed in a satisfying way.

I do not recommend this book to horror or suspense fans. I found it an actual chore to read (the made-up words didn't help).

Rating:
Summary: EC Comics Live Again
Review: The old classic horror comics were filled with stories of art that comes to life. That theme is used in this novel. In the Mid-East there is a small guarded crater. It is filled with a red dust. Legend has it that people from the stars came and created man and that the dust is a residue left behind. Some of this dust is stolen for the sole reason that it is guarded. A sample winds up in a funeral urn and is forgotten for many years.

The urn is in the hands of an old widow looking to commit suicide. For some reason she decides to paint one last painting and mixes some of what she thinks are her husbands ashes into the paint. The picture is a portrait of her paralyzed daughter long before her accident. Too tired to follow through on the suicide, she goes to sleep and is awakened by her now-young daughter.

The old woman puts suicide on a back burner and decides, instead, to paint other portraits of people missing from her life. Years later they are living with her on her old farm which is disguised as an assisted living facility.

Enter our protagonist, a professor trying to deal with a father losing his memories. For some reason he thinks the farm is a good place for his father and forces him in.

The farm is a strange place. The father is the only one who does not belong, not having been painted to life by the old woman.

What follows is really not all that interesting. The young girl steals some paint and accidentally creates some soulless monsters. Another of the resurrected is convinced by a voice from the other side to paint the serpent in a painting of Eden. The old woman becomes somewhat power-hungry when she realizes that the risen will not act the way she would like the to.

In the end very little is resolved. One has to wonder where all of the monsters are now (I suppose a sequel is possible). But ultimately I found myself wondering what the point was. We learned very little about most of the characters and those that we did learn about were not interesting. The father-son story could have worked better if the son had some rationale for sticking his father in the farm (he never checked medical facilities or anything else that a supposedly caring son would want to know). The one thing the son does seem to know is that the farm is not all above board (so why does he put his father there?). The reverse Dorian Gray idea was a little interesting but never developed in a satisfying way.

I do not recommend this book to horror or suspense fans. I found it an actual chore to read (the made-up words didn't help).

Rating:
Summary: A rare pleasure
Review: This is only my second posting on a book. There aren't too many novels that motivate me to comment, but this one is exceptional. Dust of Eden has the perfect microcosm that great stories seem to have. Take a group of intriguing characters that range from self-centered to heroic and isolate them in a compelling setting (a historic farmhouse that becomes an assisted-living facility), throw in some uncontrolled magic, and let the mix have at it. Very effective. The little girl who is the catalyst was a most insightful creation. The old lady who plays God with creation is suitably tormented. The facility is called KNEAL - Kenyon's New Eden Assisted Living. Kneel. Get it? I got it. Bravo for this one. If I think about where I wanted some of the relationships to go, I'm sure I could find some fault, but why spoil a good read!