Robert Paul
Blumenstein has, during the 1970s, worked with Virginia's
deinstitutionalization program freeing inmates from a regional
mental hospital. Robert is said to have once commented: “I've
travelled halfway around the world, yet never have I travelled so
far as into the depths of the mind.” These words are so fitting to
his second book of The Ascension Trilogy. He now lives in his
hometown of Richmond, Virginia.
Snapping The
String - a book which has more twists and turns than a helter
skelter….. It is compelling, entertaining and yet quite dark too. It
is based on the 70s drug scene - featuring a teenager who is always
up for experimenting.
The beginning
of this was really interesting and makes you think. Peyton Costello
has just been taken into a secure forensic unit of a mental
institution after being accused of murdering his parents. There
follows a horrible chain of events, some very gruesome indeed!
Peyton has to
really consider what he wants and clear his mind of the horrible
thoughts that consume him. Was he really the one responsible for the
murder of his Mum and Dad?
Because drugs
are very much involved, it leads me to believe that this poor man
was quite innocent. A victim of himself if anything.
Imagine being
trapped in such a place and knowing what he does? I really found
myself enjoying this. There is a rather sad part later on towards
the end of this book where Peyton visits the graves of Mr. and Mrs.
Costello - Robert describes how he sits there and even the noise
from passing cars are diminished in his moment. He is visited by the
ghost of his mother who embraces him in a hug and whispers that she
loves him. Peyton wipes the tears from his eyes and turns to maybe
repay the gesture but sees nobody in the cemetery. And later:
“Finally she raised her arm and acknowledged him (Peyton) with a
wave before she vanished, forever.” How poignant I thought and I'm
sure you will too.
The cover of
this book is quite eye-catching, I thought. It does portray the
story inside so well. A story of drugs, adolescence and one man who
tries to find his way and pull himself back into reality.
Vividly
portrayed and quite addictive reading.
Reviewed by
Jessica
Roberts, Bookpleasures, June 7, 2008
[Jessica
Roberts is a book reviewer for a local newspaper in West Yorkshire,
England. She has also written reviews for a national women's
magazine and published articles in various magazines.]
Riveting… WOW!
I could not lay this book down. There are twists and turns that kept
me turning the pages. This book is an action-packed thriller. I had
to keep reminding myself that Snapping the String is fiction. This
is the second book in the Ascension Trilogy. I have not read the
first. Snapping the String stands well alone, but I do want to read
the other two. This book stays with you long after you have read the
last word.
Peyton was
accused of murdering his parents. Then, he was admitted to a state
mental hospital. The treatments resembled torture. Without benefit
of a trial, he spent over twenty years in a living hell. The only
thing keeping him sane was the hope of freedom.
This review appeared in ReviewYourBook.com July 25, 2008. The
review is authored by Debra Gaynor of Hawesville, Kentucky.
Highly Recommended
Robert Paul
Blumenstein lived in both Carolinas before finding his way to
Virginia where he completed his graduate studies in theatre and now
resides. He worked in the mental health care system assisting the
state in deinstitutionalizing long-term mental health patients.
Therefore, his experience served as an inspiration for writing
“Snapping the String” which is the second book in “The Ascension
Trilogy”. Some of his other works include “Flirtin’ with Jesus” and
“Storied Crossings".
“Snapping the
String” is about Peyton Costello, an eighteen-year-old teenager
whose father is a research chemist and works for a pharmaceutical
company. Peyton, after experimenting with drugs, returns home just
to find his parents brutally murdered. The police discover him
blood-soaked and hidden in the fireplace and from then on he is
considered the prime suspect. Due to his mental condition he is
wrongly diagnosed as mentally ill and therefore he is admitted to
Mid-Virginia Mental Hospital where he has to face various kinds of
treatment such as electroconvulsive shocks, hypnosis and
tranquilizers. However, he has to be declared mentally competent to
stand trial! His only hope appears to be Sonja Day an advocate who,
in cooperation with a criminal defense lawyer, tries to give Peyton
a chance to establish his innocence of his parents’ deaths. Will
they achieve their goal? After almost two decades in the Mental
Hospital how will Peyton cope with freedom and with the truth behind
his parents’ murders? Is he able to face reality? Will he ever find
peace or will the medical and legal system work against him?
The novel is
divided into sixteen chapters and being written in a simple style it
is easy to read by everyone but it especially caters to readers who
love mysteries and psychological thrillers. There is action in every
incident and this is what keeps readers glued to the page. It’s a
book full of twists and turns and certainly with the most unexpected
ending. Its plot is very well constructed and stimulates the
reader’s interest. Finally, I would definitely recommend it to those
who look for an opportunity to “broaden” their mind.
Reviewed by Maria Gouna in Maria’s Book Reviews, July 30, 2008. Ms.
Gouna resides in Corfu, Greece, where she is a respected book
reviewer and teaches ESL and other languages.
Graphic, Revealing Dialogue- Alternate Reality
Imagery
Subject:
An emotional, mind
awakening,
fictional adventure— Blumenstein's second novel of "The
Ascension Trilogy." Peyton Costello is sent to a forensic unit of a
mental institution. He must not lose the string of hope that one day
he will be found innocent of his parents’ deaths. The plot and theme
mirror real life events the author experienced while working with
Virginia's program for freeing qualified inmates from a regional
mental hospital.
Noteworthy:
The start: "In
a gadda da vida— Bump, bump. Zip! Balls of light had crashed on the
ground..." Blumenstein’s
graphic,
alternate reality imagery and revealing dialogue will keep readers
glued to the pages. The author’s uplifting theme and the karmic
redress and retribution plot is interwoven with chilling,
mind-boggling, polarized action. The work is timely, reflecting
today's corporate manipulation of individuals. A great movie
prospect.
Bernie P. Nelson, Senior Editor for The Mindquest
Review of Books, Fall Edition, 2008
MORE THAN I
EXPECTED
In Snapping the String, Robert Paul Blumenstein
has written a brilliant book. He tells the story of Peyton
Costello, an unlucky soul who found himself at the wrong time and
wrong place becoming the fall guy for the murderers of his parents.
Young Peyton was a high school druggie from
Richmond, Virginia, who was stoned on LSD when he came upon the
murder scene and due to his erratic behavior the police sent him to
the mental hospital where he languished for twenty-two years before
getting the chance to clear his name. To sort his life out Peyton
Costello has to travel a bit to the US West Coast, Belize and Egypt
chasing not just the missing clues of the crime but also discovering
his father’s past.
If there was a weakness in the story I felt it
was the surprise ending. The real culprit was introduced to us
pretty much when Peyton found out who this person was. I feel that
had this person been introduced a bit earlier in the story the
ending would have been even more powerful. But overall this book is
fast paced and definitely holds the reader’s interest. By reading
the cover I found that Snapping the String is part of a trilogy,
which is called “The Ascension Trilogy.” To me it did not matter
that I had not read the first book of this trilogy, which was titled
Flirtin' with Jesus. Blumenstein’s Snapping the String stands alone
on its own merits. In fact, simply knowing that there are more
volumes makes me willing to keep reading more of Robert Paul
Blumenstein’s work.
I recommend if you like thrillers that you read
this book and look out for Flirtin' with Jesus as well.
Reviewed by
Gary Dale Cearley, Bookpleasures, August 15, 2008.
[Gary
Dale Cearley
is an expatriate American who chooses to write
about controversial material. His subject matter tends to run the
gamut from historical subjects to biography and even humor.
Originally from Arkansas, he has spent several years in Korea as
well as Vietnam and is now living in Thailand.]
This was a very
interesting read. I thought that the book was going to take me one
way, and then halfway through it took a whole different turn. Peyton
Costello is a young man who is experimenting with drugs. He goes on
a pretty bad trip and tumbles back to his parents’ house. He goes
inside and finds a horrific site. Both his parents have been
brutally murdered. As anyone would, he started to freak out and ran
outside. His neighbors heard him screaming and saw him with blood
all over him and that was that. He was taken into custody and
everyone assumed that because he dabbled in drugs that he killed his
parents.
He is sent to a
mental institution until he is deemed able to be competent enough
for trial. Around this time the world basically forgets about him.
He undergoes terrible experiments, drugs that cause him to become so
doped up he drools finding himself slipping in and out of reality,
and he undergoes lots and lots of electroshock therapy. For reasons
I won’t give away, he gets out, but it has been a long time since he
has seen the light of day.
Towards the
middle and end of the story Peyton starts to explore who his father
really was, what he is into, and who it was that really killed his
parents. He meets some very interesting characters along the way and
finds himself out in the jungle and in a tomb. I was not expecting
the story to take this turn. I cannot go into more detail without
giving it away, but it started to feel like an adventure book as you
got more into it.
I think that
Robert Paul Blumenstein did a great job at introducing us to Peyton
and to making us fall in love with him and root for him. He did a
great job at making the doctors seem evil. I did not particularly
think the book flowed that well, but it was still filled with enough
excitement that I found it to be a pretty good read.
I would
recommend this to anyone. I would highly recommend reading the first
half of the book to anyone who is interested in therapy or who is in
college for some sort of psychology degree. You really get a lot of
information about what the mental institutions used to put their
patients through and how unethical they were. You really learn a
lot.
This review appeared in
Front Street Reviews, October, 2008. The review is authored
by Ashley Merrill, a recent graduate from the University of Maine
with a bachelor’s degree in psychology. When she’s not writing, she
works in an adult crisis house in Augusta, Maine.
There’s literary fiction and there's genre
fiction, and then there’s Robert Paul Blumenstein’s new novel,
Snapping the String, which draws from nearly every genre out
there. The publishers blurb, “a chilling psycho-thriller,” will
definitely draw the attention of psycho-thriller fans, but what
about fans of outright horror, Southern-gothic grotesquerie, magical
realism, romance, religious fiction, Bildungsroman (albeit a
uniquely belated Bildungsroman), mystery, hardboiled
detective noir, adventure, or social commentary a la One Flew
Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and Girl, Interrupted? Snapping
the String definitely deserves an audience beyond that of the
thriller aficionado.
I like Blumenstein’s concise, uncomplicated
descriptions. Detailing Peyton Costello’s hallucination from an acid
trip (which is how we’re introduced to our, at first impression,
dubious hero), Blumenstein writes, “the walls inflated, then
deflated,” which gave me a perfect visual, like something surreal
out of Alice In Wonderland. When Peyton releases his
distraught embrace from his dead father propped up in bed, we get a
macabre snippet any vintage King or Lovecraft lover would enjoy,
“Then his dad’s head rolled forward and fell from his neck….His
father’s head tumbled to the floor, bounced once, twice, and then
rolled to a rest.”
As bad as witnessing the gruesome aftermath of
decapitation, imagine how bad it would be being falsely accused of
murdering your parents and spending the next twenty-two years of
your life unjustly jailed at the Mid-Virginia Mental Hospital,
undergoing regular electroconvulsive “therapy” and taking so many
unnecessary drug cocktails that your average junkie’s habit might
look like aspirin-therapy in comparison. Welcome to Peyton
Costello’s wasted world. And never mind that Peyton does not have a
mental disorder (that’s beside the point to the vindictive psychiaquacks
at Mid-Virginia); Peyton just better be sure he doesn’t tick off the
wrong mental health professional or she’s bound to recommend,
besides a frontal l lobotomy, a “Second Surgical Procedure”:
castration, because, “‘I don’t see what further use Mr. Costello has
for his gonads.’” Does Blumenstein grind his axe too sharply in his
commentary of the evils perpetrated inside psych-hospitals against
mental health patients as late as the mid-1980s? I’d say yes at
first glance, but since I’ve read so many non-fictional accounts
concerning the abuses, how could I justifiably say no? Perhaps I
could say yes to, at times, the narrative feels mildly didactic,
preachy, but it’s mostly preaching to the choir.
Peyton’s surprising release from Mid-Virginia
portrayed enough drama that it could have served a viable climax to
Snapping the String, but then we’d always wonder who killed
Peyton’s parents. Blumenstein compellingly keeps us in suspense,
whizzing us first into the jungles of Belize, beloved by his father
(and where Peyton grabs a native wife, Oriana), on to Egypt and
inside the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid of Khufu, where
Peyton and his long-lost friend, Ishmael, discover the first real
clues – mysterious apparitions – directing them to a holy man, and
to the terrible secret he’s been hiding behind a bookshelf for
years.
This
review appeared in Book Room Reviews and in Library Thing,
September 30, 2008. The review was authored by Brent Higgins, who
resides in Chino, California.
Novel
Offers Shocking Ending!!!