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.]

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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.
 

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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.

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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

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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.]

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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.

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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.