Customer Reviews

Ashes to Ashes: The Dragon's Flame (Blackstone Chronicles, Part 3)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

If you haven't read the first 2 parts of "The Blackstone Chronicles", please do so! You'll understand this review better! In this third part, Rebecca Morrison, niece of the eccentric Martha Ward, goes to the town flea market with Oliver Metcalf, the newspaper editor, who has been trying to find out about the asylum's past, and has witnessed a gruesome sight at the end of Part 2. While at the flea market, Rebecca finds a beautiful, ornate cigarette lighter in the shape of a dragon's head. She buys it for her cousin, Andrea, who is coming home to Blackstone, after being thrown out by her boyfriend and becoming pregnant. As is expected, she and her mother, Martha, clash, but not until the story has been established. I can't say much more without giving away the plot, but I can say, it follows the lines of the previous parts, and leads you a little closer to discovering what is going on in Blackstone. Pick this up, and enjoy

I have read the entire installment of the Blackstone chronicles but this one stands out the most. Sweet simple minded Rebecca is pleased when her cousin has decided to return to live with her fanatical mother. A well-meaning Rebecca buys her a fancy lighter at a flea market, but like the other objects from the Asylum it carries a deadly curse. The whole series pulls you and gets you involved it is reminiscent of the old series Friday the 13th, definately one you won't want to miss

Once again, the basic plot line in "The Dragon's Flame" is almost identical to the first two installments. The main character is Rebecca, a quiet, friendly young woman who lives her strict aunt. When Rebecca's rebellious cousin comes home, chaos mounts. This extremely dysfunctional family makes the story very interesting, and difficult to put down.

This book is EXACTLY the same as the first two parts, but centers on one of the more interesting characters (like another reader already stated), Rebecca, and is therefore a little bit more readable. The structure of this serial reminded me of the early works of James Herbert (SPOILER AHEAD!): Someone gets introduced - and killed off. After that, someone gets introduced... - you get the point

With "Ashes To Ashes: The Dragon's Flame", the third episode of John Saul's monthly serialized six part novel "The Blackstone Chronicles", it is becoming clear that the overwhelming themes of this book is man's cruelty to others, and that of revenge. In this novel, serialized in six monthly segments, a mysterious somebody is sending, seemingly at random, cursed objects to families. Objects that always seem to end up destroying these families, and causing madness and murder in their wake. While good, neither of the first two episodes really rose above the ordinary, although they are getting better. With this segment, Saul realizes that he can't just rewrite every episode and pawn it off as a new chapter, so he mixes up the formula somewhat this time around.

The trouble in Blackstone had started when the town okays the renovation of the Blackstone Asylum, a terrible and hated place that has been closed down for years after the suicide of it's last superintendent. In revenge for the Asylum's desecration however, somebody is sending out cursed objects, each having something to do with a past tragedy at the asylum. In the first segment the object is a cursed doll that belonged to a young child that disappeared forever behind the walls of the asylum and it destroys the developer's family. In the second, the object had been a locket, which had been extracted via vivisection from a paranoid woman's intestinal tract, destroys the banker's family that had okayed the loan for the Asylums' renovation.

In this third episode, the relationship between Oliver Metcalf, the editor/publisher of "The Blackstone Chronicle", the town's weekly newspaper, and the town's assistant librarian Rebecca Morrison, is heating up. On a date, while at the local flea market, they find a dragonhead lighter, and Rebecca decides to buy it for her cousin Andrea Ward.

After many set-backs, and after fifteen years, Andrea is being forced to come back to the home she has sworn never to return to. None of this is pleasing to Rebecca's aunt, and Andrea's mother Martha Ward. "Aunt" Martha is one seriously twisted, religious, and cartoonish crackpot, who spends hours praying for forgiveness for sins, sins that seem to be created out of whole cloth to the accompanant of incense and Gregorian chants.

She looks upon both her daughter as white trash, and her "sinning" niece as Jobian tasks that have been put upon her to test her hateful hellfire and brimstone Christianity. But her twisted Christianity doesn't stop her from taking out her meanness and bitterness on those around her, and she plans on making the lives of Rebecca and Andrea as miserable as hers.

The personalities clash immediately as Rebecca is kicked out of her room for Andrea, then Martha has a conniption fit when she finds out that Andrea is pregnant. After much thinking, Andrea decides that raising her child around Martha is unacceptable and has an abortion, which then almost causes the sanctimonious Martha to stroke out. And through all of this Andrea becomes more and more obsessed with her new lighter. The lighter originally belonged to out-of-wedlock mother who was locked up and died, along with her baby, behind the walls of the feared Blackstone Asylum.

At the same time, Oliver, who has been having headaches through out all three episodes, now has these headaches developing into migraines, which themselves are now followed by visions of a young boy who is being perpetually tortured.

Instead of concentrating on the curse and its effects, this episode of Saul's six-part novel concentrates more on this episode's characters. It also has enough story for a book twice its size. I don't think that you can read this episode without having read the previous two. However, more importantly, this is a pivotal chapter of this novel, as things start to seriously change for the novel's principal characters. I think that with some rewriting and re-editing, this is the episode that could very well stand on its own. Four stars.

For this site I have all six of these volumes in this series:


The Blackstone Chronicles #1: Eye for an Eye: The Doll (Blackstone Chronicles).
The Blackstone Chronicles #2: Twist of Fate: The Locket (Blackstone Chronicles).
The Blackstone Chronicles #3: Ashes to Ashes: The Dragon's Flame (Blackstone Chronicles, Part 3).
The Blackstone Chronicles #4: In the Shadow of Evil: The Handkerchief (Blackstone Chronicles).
The Blackstone Chronicles #5: Day of Reckoning: The Stereoscope (Blackstone Chronicles, Part 5).
The Blackstone Chronicles #6: Asylum (Blackstone Chronicles) (No 6).

Part three of this serial novel concerns the Ward family. Andrea, the black sheep of the family, returns to her home broke and pregnant. Her religious aunt decides to put the baby up for adoption after its birth. Andrea's cousin buys her a cigarette lighter in the shape of a dragon's head from a flea market. The lighter had been the instrument by which an inmate at the asylum systematically burned herself to death. Now Andrea tries the very same stunt and almost burns down the house. Andrea does die from the burns she sustained.

Now her aunt has the lighter and she has decided to purify everything by setting the family on fire. Well, aunt and mansion are consumed in the flame but the niece manages to escape.

Now we must wait another month to find out what happens next. The series is interesting in that a month goes by between parts, both in the story and in the real world. So stay tuned and find out what happens with a certain handkerchief next month.

The citizens of Blackstone, N.H., do not realize that a "dark figure" has returned to the old Blackstone Asylum, long closed, and has found the trove of personal articles once belonging to the inmates. With a need to wreak vengeance on certain people in the town, he starts giving out some of these old objects, then watches as people's lives are changed forever, each "gift" leading to a tale of horror. This is the third volume in the Saul's Blackstone Chronicles, and the "dark figure" is about to bestow the third object.

(No spoilers.) Rebecca Morrison, a young woman who has suffered minor brain damage after a terrible accident, is living with her aunt, Martha Ward, a religious fanatic. When Martha's alienated daughter Andrea returns home to live, pregnant and abandoned by her boyfriend, Rebecca unwittingly sets in motion the events which the "dark figure" has planned. While on a trip to the local Flea Market with Oliver Metcalf, editor of the local newspaper, Rebecca finds and buys a gold cigarette lighter with red eyes, the "perfect present" for her cousin Andrea, a present which changes all their lives.

In this volume, Rebecca comes closer to being a real character than are the main characters of Saul's previous novels, allowing the reader to empathize with her, to some extent. Her friend Oliver Metcalf, who ties together all the novels, also grows as the reader gains additional knowledge of him and the town and begins to feel as if real people, rather than cardboard cutouts, inhabit this community. The Gothic horror continues, with the kind of over-the-top melodrama and clichéd action that makes horror novels fun to read--entertaining, rather than terrifying.

Here the religious fanaticism of Aunt Martha Ward and her ultimate fate begin to suggest that Saul will further develop this series into a confrontation between God and the devil, rather than simply an accumulation of gory horror stories. The story moves quickly when the dragon-lighter is introduced into the lives of the characters, and the author offers broader hints than usual about the reasons that a particular character has been chosen as a gift recipient. n Mary Whipple

The story is starting to grow on me. Although sometimes I get the feeling I'm reading the screanplay to Creepshow or Tales from the Crypt. Rebbeca is definitely my favorite character in this series. Her character is well defined and multi faceted. I'm actually getting interested about how he is going to decide to finish this