Customer Reviews

Conversations with the Devil

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

 

 

"Conversations" was interesting. Started out very interesting, finished up totally deus ex machina and rushed. It was new, reading one of these from the POV of an author who is not trying to convert me via fear and terror, but who's just trying to tell a good story -- with a side of deep thought.

However, it goes from fascinating philosophical exchange to a more mainstream, typical "bad guy menaces heroine by moving stuff around with telekenisis and visions" scenario in the last few pages, and "ultimate triumph" doesn't really make much sense according to the rules and theology laid out in the first half of the novel (actually, the story doesn't really seem consistent with its own theology -- Heaven is for boring, easily duped into guilt and "repenting," sheeplike people; Hell is a place of eternal pleasures for the smart, non-duped, edgy people, and people who actually do bad things go to Limbo/Purgatory to get sorted out, until they fully understand just why they are so naughty -- but Hell is still used as a threat, by the Hell-advocate? Well, I do believe Lucifer has just undermined the whole game, right there).

Of course, we could wash it all away with "well he was lying anyway." I dunno, I was expecting more of a challenge. How much more powerful would this have been if the Devil were telling the truth -- but still deserved only to be resisted and defeated? (Or if the lies had made some consistent sense?)

The characterization was quite good (for everyone except the strangely unaffecting main, female character -- I could not get into her. She was even and reserved toward other characters, which is fine, but she was pretty emotionally inaccessible to the reader as well, which is not so fine). And the mental shenanigans were edge-of-seat interesting for about 3/4 of the book, but the resolution disappointed me. Wasn't feeling the menace. I expected to be surprised, and I got that, I suppose, but I was also expecting to be blown completely away (really, the build-up is that good), and I just wasn't.

"I, Lucifer" (similar subject matter) was more fun, more troubling, and more satisfying, if a bit flip and less conclusive.

I'd rather have bought the paperback. Still, a very decent read, and I'm glad I do own it.

This is an interesting book that makes you think, makes you wonder about where you stand with your own existance. It is not meant to pull you in one direction or the other, to decide for you or shove theology down your throat. Granted I felt Sara was difficult to "get into"; difficult to understand. The words were there but the feelings seem difficult to reach. I didn't quite feel the fear, the pain, the horror. Just the questions, the "truth" of the devil, the imagination and confusion. Perhaps you do not stand with God, or religion, but that does not mean you stand with Satan. It may be worth your curiousity.

In somewhat isolated Delwood, Connecticut, two hours on back roads to any major city, the Delwood Academy, affectionately known as "Delac", is considered a pipeline to Yale. Though she never attended the school, psychologist Sarah Lynch works with some of the students who go there as many suffer from isolation with where they live as they have virtual choices re the Internet.

Still when Sarah learns that one of her Delacian patients, Fredric Marash committed suicide she is despondent and wonders how she failed him. Rationalizing that she will not make the same mistake twice, she looks at what turned Fredric into a Satanist and if that worship of the Devil led to his taking his life. Sarah lost her faith in God years ago after the Lord failed to heed her desperate prayers during a tragedy. However, the cynical rationalist is unprepared for Mr. Devil to visit her at her office. The glib visitor spins a different take on the bible and the war between him and God but conceals that the latest battleground is Sarah's soul as he seductively offers her the choice of happiness while he claims his adversary demands kneeling in total adulation.

Once the Devil makes his initial appearance that occurs just after the opening set up of place, time and catalyst, readers will not be able to put down this fascinating "dialogue". Sarah is terrific as she has doubts about God in spite of her best friend who is a nun. Her friend tries to counter what Sarah sees within herself, her family and with her patients. When the slick Devil arrives he smoothly provides her choices that look so much nicer and freer than what God commands of the faithful. Who will win the latest war between Heaven and Hell not fought as End of Days universe-wide Armageddon, but instead one soul at a time?

Harriet Klausner

Were to begin? I guess from the start. Up until the wind-up for the conclusion, this book was fairly good (with a few problems I'll get to in a moment). I found the characters compelling, interesting, and empathetic. The story moved at a good pace and I liked the character development and the setting. It's wasn't a nail-biter, turn-pager, but I did find myself wishing I had more time to keep reading whenever my eyes gave up on me and I had to go to bed. In fact, I can easily say that I thoroughly enjoyed approximately 90% of the novel.

So let's get to the reasons why I deducted 2 stars and titled this review "Fecal Matter?"

1)Christian Propaganda is Fecal Matter. I'm not attacking the religion or faith here. They key word in that sentence is "propaganda" not "Christian." I hate propaganda of all sorts. Towards the end of the book I get the sense that Jeff Rovin is trying to convert me to Christianity or (worse) trying to lecture me on what he considers proper morals based on his Christian faith. I bought this book from the Horror section, not the Inspirational/Christian Section. If I wanted a lecture on how to live my life, on abortion being a sin, on the time when life truly begins (conception vs birth), and other such nonsense I would have bought a different book. Basically what Rovin seems to be doing is using the Devil as a mouthpiece meant to confirm what his (Rovin's) preacher has been lecturing him on in Church every Sunday. By the end of the book we are meant to walk away with a better understanding of God and why He is the silent, strong type where as the Devil is but an empty barrel making the most noise. Blah!

To make matters much worse, he even has a juvenile and ignorant understanding of such matters and is spouting nonsense as though it's dogma. Anyone who want's to convince me of something better have the facts straight, but Rovin is showing a very clear lack of knowledge while also presenting himself as an authority on it. For example, he uses the Pentagram as the ultimate symbol of evil with which the Devil can be conjured. This is a ridiculous notion that dates back to the times when the Church was trying to convert pagans. The Pentagram has nothing to do with the Devil (besides a bunch of teenagers adopting it over time to show their anger with Christianity.) So either Rovin is trying to say that all non-Christians religions are satanic, or he's showcasing his ignorance on a grand scale. Either way this smells like Fecal Matter to me.

For this I removed 1 star. I would have removed all of them, but it's not 100% clear that he's actually trying to convert the reader.

2) The mistakes found in this book have boggled my mind and completely astounded me. For this I have a question for the publisher (TOR) and the author (should either one read this review). "Did you accidentally send the wrong manuscript to the presses?" When a person writes a story you can expect plenty of mistakes to be found in it (from the careless typos to large ones). But before it gets published usually it's read and corrected by a vast number of people. The author, his friends, family, agent, editor, copyeditor, someone, anyone . . . did nobody look at this before printing? I counted 38 spelling mistakes in the first 200 pages alone (and that's when I stopped counting, but there were more to be found).

Examples of misspelled words:
to/too/two
you're/your/you
it's/its
where/were
and more . . .

When I read a sentence like this: "Sara walked two her car." (TWO? her car)I can't help but wonder about the author and publisher. When I read "That's you're bicycle?" (YOU'RE? bicycle) I cringe.

But the problems didn't end there. There are large sections of the book that are inundated with repetition of words and names. In a scene with one male and one female character you don't need to keep reminding me in EVERY sentence of their names. Sara did this, Sara said that, Sara went there, Sara, Sara, Sara . . . enough! A simple "she" would work so much better. Even in a scene where Sara was the only character and nobody else was mentioned he wrote the name "Sara" repeatedly until I almost got my red pen out and started crossing out and replacing the name with "she."

To his credit, towards the end things improved in that aspect (even if the story began to fall apart). For this I removed another star.

3)The ending! Could it have been any more anticlimactic, boring, and a bigger letdown? I think not! There's even a final chapter (chapter 18) which consists of two short paragraphs and is absolutely infuriating. To his credit I will give him "props" for two things: 1) The ending was so bad that I never saw it coming (well, I guess in a way I did because I was afraid of it, but I thought to myself that it couldn't possibly be so bad so I was surprised to discover it was). 2)That last chapter showed me that he is capable of going outside his own reality to think like someone else (unless Jeff Rovin is a transsexual who used to be a woman). It reads like it's written by a man-hating woman who is angry with all men and wants to humiliate them at every chance. But Jeff Rovin is a man (isn't he????). It added nothing whatsoever to the story and it aggravated me because I think it was meant to trick the reader. When I read things like that last chapter I envision a man sitting in his underwear behind a computer screen with rolls of fat spilling over his body thinking to himself "I'm so smart and you're so dumb, hah!"

I wanted to take another star off for that, but up until the end things were going very well and I was enjoying the book (despite its many flaws).

One final note (and yes I realize this has been a long review): Please, please, please if you don't speak a foreign language or don't know a foreign culture don't rely on the internet for your information. I've seen it done so many times and it's always wrong. Rovin did it with Greek. He mistranslated a Greek word to make it fit his story, ignoring the fact that some of his readers might actually speak Greek and know he's full of Fecal Matter. Also, Baphomet is not a name for the devil! Let me repeat this: Baphomet is not a name for the devil!!!!! It's a symbol that has been adapted by satanists. Saying that Baphomet is another name for the devil is like saying Swastika is another name for Hitler. . . it's not!


After it's all said and done, maybe I'm more forgiving with this book because I still can't forget about another book I recently read that almost made me want to never read anything again. The book I'm talking about is Michael Laimo's "Deep in the Darkness." It's such an insult to the horror genre and literature as a whole that if it were the first book I ever read I would never have read anything ever again. I guess the good thing about reading something as bad as that makes everything else sparkle in contrast. So, Mr. Rovin, you might be getting 3 stars from me simply because I recently read an atrocity of a book and I'm comparing everything since to it.

Jeff Rovin's "Conversations with the Devil" MIGHT be Fecal Matter, but Michael Laimo's "Deep in the Darkness" IS the massive, steaming pile of manure by which everything else seems like a literary gem in comparison.

I feel compelled to warn other readers! This book is terrible (Note: my standards aren't even very high). This is the first book I have ever read by this author. I hope he was just having a bad month, because he wrote a lot of other books, and if they are all this bad, how sad that would be. It's not that I didn't like the premise of the book (because I did), it's just that it was so poorly written that it actually distracts from enjoying the book. The characters are never fully developed, the plot is choppy, and the climax is disappointing. Let me give you an example: somewhere in the second half of the book the author introduces a completely new character and a new inner struggle of the main character, both of which become main parts of the climax, and neither of which have anything to do with the supernatural aspect that the first half of the novel focused on. It fizzles at the end. Very disappointing!

I'm afraid this was a tedious read. The characters are dull and unpalatable and it takes about 180 pages to get to any meat. However, not to worry...the meaty and interesting section ends quickly and within 20 pages you are back to plodding narrative and uninteresting characters. I would give this one a miss!