Customer Reviews

Saint Jack and Toad: Third Angel of the Apocalypse

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

 

 

From "Curled Up With A Good Book (curled up.com)":

Five Stars (Highest Rating)
The wonderfully realized Saint Jack and Toad...doesn't fit easily into any standard genre of fiction. Set in modern-day New York City, it reads like a suspense tale but contains touches of fantasy, and is as realistically gritty at times as the backstreets and alleyways of New York's rougher neighborhoods...(A) stirring tale but...also storytelling with intelligence and social consciousness (increasingly rare) that allows the book to transcend the limits of a "genre" novel.

Jack Cassidy (the "Saint Jack" of the title) is a New York City firefighter. The book opens with a vivid scene in which Jack is attempting to rescue a young child from a raging fire:

"And he'd better find her fast! Heat! He could feel the beast nearby,its vast appetite for destruction coming closer. The fire scared him but it was the heavy smoke that made him fear for the child's life at the moment. Nine times out of ten it was the fire's breath and not the fire that killed. Is the girl still alive? Maybe not. Not in this...Smoke concealed everything. The fire began to perform for him, presenting him with spirals of flame curling along the ceiling. Chilling grins of flame which his sight could discern despite the billowing fog."

Jack does save the young girl and then, in perverse irony, that same night, driving home, he is shocked to discover that his own house is ablaze, and that within that blaze are the cremated bodies of his own wife and child.

(The novel) is a love story as well, for Jack never fully recovers from the loss of his wife and daughter. His love is too great. A short while after their deaths, he walks to their graves with the intent of killing himself. He is stopped...by the sudden appearance of a holy vision, a Lady, who tells him he must live in order to save humankind from a growing evil that would summon the "Third Angel of the Apocalypse" and destroy the world.

...Most of the action takes place on the streets of New York City's coarse Lower East Side...The novel is filled with characters from those hostile streets, prostitutes, pimps, youth gangs, professional gangsters and runaway teens. This is a novel as gritty and New York City streetwise as it is philosophical and thought provoking...

...The "Toad" of the title is a runaway boy who lives by his wits and by street-performing his magic tricks for donations on the sidewalks of New York City. He and another recent runaway, Susan, are thrown inadvertantly into the path of the evil that Jack is seeking to find and destroy. Susan, who ran away from the threat of molestation by her stepfather, now has her life threatened by circumstance and Toad and Jack must risk their own lives to try to save her.

...fast paced action, a novel of faith and redemption, of good versus evil,an adventure-filled tale that stretches out to explore the nature of things, of greed and even of God...There is much magic in this book, not the least of which is Carraher's superior prose...

... [website]

Really enjoyed this book. It's rare to find a book that combines the fast read enjoyment of a Stephen King novel with some depth of thought. Imagine, an intelligent fantasy?! Jack Cassidy (Saint Jack) is a NYC firefighter who loses his own family in a tragic fire. He's so distraught he wants to kill himself but is kept from doing it by the sudden appearance of a vision that tells him he must live in order to save the world from a growing threatening evil. This he agrees to do and so his adventures begin. Along the way he's helped by a pair of angels (who appear to him in the form of rats in his basement) and by a talisman that grants him great powers (invisibility, etc.) All of this is wonderfully written with a good deal of imagery. In each scene the reader feels like he/she is right there. And the book gives you plenty to think about after you put it down. Apocalypse soon? Maybe, and it might be us humans who bring it down upon ourselves. Scary.

"Saint Jack" is a great urban fantasy but the other published book is superior to this edition. The new edition has a larger type font and so is easier to read and contains great drawings which this edition doesn't have. So you should buy that instead of this. I happen to have both books being a big fan of this particular author.

Jack Cassidy is a New York City firefighter who ironically loses his own family in a fire in his house. He is so distraught that he goes to the family grave to kill himself, to put a bullet in his head. But he's stopped by a vision, a Lady in Blue Light, who tells Jack he must live so as to fight a gathering and growing evil occurring in the world. Jack accepts the Lady's words. But what is that evil? How is he to find it? A dream tells Jack where to start, telling him to go back to where he grew up, back to the mean streets of Manhattan's Lower East Side. Amongst the sinners there, he will find the one great sin he seeks. It's here, amongst the pimps and prostitutes, thieves and downtrodden souls, (some of whom he helps)that he gains his nickname: "Saint Jack".

Toad is a runaway boy, surviving through his wits and his talents as a street entertainer. A boy "dressed in the Armor of Avoid" as he trusts no one and is friends with few. But he meets another runaway, a girl Susan who has fled abuse at her home, and he befriends her. The two young souls huddle together in a sense, surviving the potentially cruel streets of the big city. The evil Jack seeks eventually swirls about Susan, threatening her life, and so it is that Saint Jack and Toad are pushed together by circumstances, by the touch of an evil that affects them both. Jack is pledged to destroy it while Toad seeks to rescue the friend he's grown to love from it. Jack has help in his mission, he's not alone in his fight. He's been granted the friendship of a pair of protecting angels as well as the gift of an ancient talisman with great powers. He'll need all the help he can get for the evil Jack seeks to destroy has its defenders as well, that of the very powers of Hell, which powers want to see this evil succeed in this world. Jack is a warrior standing in the middle, a fighter between the forces of good and evil. This is a superior, intelligent, imaginative book with wonderful writing which is rare today. A book worth reading many times.

This is an intelligent and humane book and, in an odd way, sentimental. There is an underlying sweetness in this book (if one can use that term when speaking of a gritty urban novel that takes place in large part on New York City's "mean streets"). Perhaps that sweetness exists because love is so prominent in the novel. Much of the actions of the two main characters (the fireman Jack and the runaway boy, Toad)are motivated by love, by Jack's love for his family (now lost) and Toad's for Susan, a runaway girl.

After reading the book I found I was as interested in some of the underlying themes as I was in the main story itself. There's a lot of "food for thought" in this book.

There is the event Jack experiences when he first goes out with the super powerful crystal he took off a dead man's bones, a corpse that he dug up in the basement of his brownstone. It is a stone that has the ability to grant the wearer many powers. And it offers Jack one such power immediately as he is suddenly seeing people as the "angels see" them. That is, he sees the souls of the people he passes on the street walking side by side with their physical bodies, and he is shocked to horror by what he sees in many (not all)of the people passing by. This struck me as an enhancement of the Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde theme. Here the good side of people(presented for public consumption) exists side by side with the evil side, with the evil being hidden underneath. Hidden from the sight of other people but on grotesque display for God and the angles to see. Jack, after experiencing the "truth" about people, is frightened of what he might see if he looked in the mirror and saw his own hidden self. Is he like the others?

This same theme is repeated later in a sequence in which Jack meets "Truth" (an anemic Truth) and she tells him one truth in particular, that all of society is based upon humans learning to hide what they truly are, both from others and from themselves. A point which is worth contemplating.

Here, the author is not talking of a single man (Dr. Jekyll) with a dark secret of evil, but of many of us in society, many with our souls scarred and gone to rot by what we secretly choose to do.

Another of this book's themes is the DNA experimentation that is taking place in this book (and in real life). Is it possible that we humans are in fact, tinkering with the "Waters of Life"? I.e., the natural "order" of DNA. Will we, in the name of science, ultimately produce a destructive force that will threaten all of us? The more I read in newspapers the more I think it's possible.

And the means by which this experimentation takes place (in this book) is quite terrifying when one thinks about it. Young runaway children are kidnapped off the streets to be used in labs for scientific purposes. Could that be happening now, in real life? God forbid, but there are a lot of youngsters missing every year, aren't there?

In real life, scientists are splicing jellyfish genes into mice, so that the mice glow green, for goodness sake. Who knows what else is being done that doesn't make it into the news? And what if one of these experiments escapes from a lab (as some movies would have it) and begins to corrupt the DNA of the world itself?

It is only when going back and contemplating the novel's underlying themes that one realizes what a harsh indictment the book is actually giving us, against the nature of people (with their hidden sins)and against the many current ills that permeate the societies (even the best of them) of our world.

There are other themes worth discussing in this rich and layered book but it would take too many pages to write of them here. This is a book that is great fun to read and, perversely, a bit disturbing to think about.

I stumbled on to this book while reading Stephen King's Dreamcatcher. It was presented to me as a highly recommended twist and turn for contemporary suspense and adventure - and it is. It's a different type of story. One that strikes you as odd at first and then runs into a direction I never expected. I eased through the story with a quick eye and relished at the verve and style of the writer. Not a bad piece of work and worth a read, especially when the story begins to roll. The beginning, I will say, sort of lingered for me (it stretched for a moment) - but then everything peaked into high gear like a tsunami. My favorite scene (don't worry - no spoilers) occurs during midday or so, and there is someone on a rooftop, along with money and a rifle. That was very well written.

There are more great scenes in this book - and Jack (the main) has some of the best movie-like moments that are so picturesque, and visual, it adds to the cool of the book. In a nutshell, the book is AWESOME. It was a nice change of pace from my typical musings. I am only giving this book four stars because I caught something that the editor missed - but I am forgiving - the story still has impact. The story is an odyssey and fun and surprising. I also give it a four because I think that I would love to know more about Cimmerian Farms - but I should give it a five for the nice touch with a character named Piejak! Worth reading.

I loved this book. It's adventure/fantasy that is literary, and a love story too. Best I've read in years.