Customer Reviews

House of the Jaguar

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House Of The Jaguar by mythologist, systems analyst, internet marketer, and iconoclast C. Charles Coyle is a gripping new Mayan mythology oriented action/adventure science fiction novel for young readers. Engaging the reader from first page to last, House Of The Jaguar is a futuristic tale of Kat, an American teenager confined in her youth to the moderns of technology and the digital age, in her confrontation with a digressing, broken world as result of earthquakes and the release of an underworld creature, the Xibalban, and her alliance with shamanic tribesmen in an ultimate struggle for life. House Of The Jaguar is to be given high praise for its originality, and is very highly recommended as an intriguing read science fiction and fantasy enthusiasts.

This Young Adult/teen tale is an inner exploration of the depth of the psyche/soul. Although the story is set in Guatemala it is not a literal depiction of life in Guatemala but rather a tranformational journey meant to act as an initiatory tale for those of us starved for initiaion in this overly rational world. It uses archetypal-like story in the same way the ancient Greeks used it in their theatrical extravaganzas, allowing the participants to draw upon the play as a ritual of catharsis so they did not have to literally allow the themes to play themselves out on the stage of their daily lives.

The pages of the tale should be entered as though entering into an initiation, recognizing the universal aspect of the characters as flavors of ourselves, exploring how they resonate with our own inner depth workings. Anyone who enters the pages from a rational mindset is bound to be disappointed, missing the complex twisting and turnings of the archetypal journey that the story explores as it descends into the inner realm (cave)of the subconscious/unconscious.

On the outer level the tale is quite simple, using a current mythical motif (the myth of 2012)to keep the dragons of the mind busy, marrying the myth to a modern day concern (ecological devastation) to come up with a heroic initiation tale of healing and wholing, a window of opening that seems to make its first conscious appearance in the teenage years (like Percival finding the Grail castle for the first time). The story stays true to the task of following the path laid out in "The Hero's Journey," hinting at more realities than those found only on the surface of a tale. It explores all levels of the Hero's Journey, from the Call to Adventure, the Refusal of the Call, Meeting the Mentor, Crossing the Threshold, Meeting the Allies, the Ordeal, Accessing the Boon, and finally the Return to the world from which the journey began. The book seems to follow what I would call the "Way of the Jaguar," using a totem ally to access one's deepest woundings in order to heal the inner spots and knots of the soul, and in the process the woundings of the earth as well since each of us is a hologram of the whole.

Don't let the simplicity of the story fool you, for deep inside the transformatinal tale a wondrous chain of events is unleashed that can affect the reader on many levels, helping jumpstart their process of reconnecting with the often overlooked but thoroughly entangled parts of the Self.

I traveled in Guatemala and thought this could be interesting. Terribly written, could have been a high school project. Possibly a first project?