Psychic Blues: Confessions of a Conflicted Medium Paperback – August 7, 2012

This was a really entertaining read. Mark Edward knows what he's doing, and a carefully cultivated personality is evident through the pages. I would have liked more detail about the spiritualist church, and about some of the celebrities, but Edwards really knows how to keep you tantalized.

The writing is pretty good, but the editor has a problem with contractions that REALLY bothered me. Dialogue sometimes sounded stilted because of the lack of them, and while the text is clean and lacks errors, sometimes the writing was a little stiff. That said, Edward's narrative voice is very strong. I would have loved more info about a seance session; it's the one element that's really obviously missing from the text, especially considering how much info there is about cold reading.

Funnily enough, I walked away with a lot of respect for psychics and what they do; there's a lot of educated guessing and a real art to figuring out how to reassure people the right way. I think a psychic or a seance could be a really entertaining experience--if you walk into it with open eyes and understand that it's a performance.

You'd expect that a professional psychic entertainer with a long career would have many tales to tell, and the author doesn't disappoint, but this book also surpassed my expectations on many levels. It gives some very specific knowledge on the techniques of psychic entertainment, airs out the industry's dirty laundry, is candid enough about the manipulations and shady aspects of the business, without being a blatant critique of the psychics or the people who love and need them. It's a symbiotic relationship, and there is a need for it even in the age of psychology and science. The author is also a great storyteller and has some wonderfully vivid descriptions of people and places, that really make his stories come alive. I found this book totally by chance and am very glad that I did.

I couldn't get through this book. The author is unapologetic about scamming people, and seeks to make himself look like a "good guy" every chance he gets. What's worse, he's DULL. I thought this would be a fun, quick read, but it was tedious and long winded, without a lot of humor or self awareness. Even if you normally love books about the paranormal and the people who work in it, this is a waste of time and money.

This book is essentially a collection of the author's most-interesting experiences as a magician and psychic. The book is not a cheesy expose about psychics nor a thinly-disguised sham to popularize them. The author's stories are entertaining, enlightening and exceptionally well written. They are remarkably candid and, in a few cases, surprisingly heart-warming. This book is well worth your time if you have even the slightest interest in conventional magic or the landscape of New Age thought. Mark Edward is both a talented writer and a person of conscience!

This was a funny and insightful look into the world of con artists extraordinaire, psychics. It's a classic tell-all of a despicable industry. Mark goes into details relating his time with the "Psychic Friends" Network, and how it really worked. However, he eventually grew a conscience, and decided to put it all down on paper. It's a light read, where the author relates several stories where he interacted with the Hollywood elite under the guise of his phony façade.

I first heard of this book while seeing the author in an interview on TV. Toward the end of the show, an audience member stood up and insisted he attempt to contact her mother! If he is that good coming clean, I can only imagine what he was like when he was "at work". If you have a friend or family member throwing away their money to a medium , get them this book!

Here is one of my favorite paraphrases from "Psychic Blues" that I think would sort of communicate a "love him or hate him" quality for the author, Mark Edward, throughout the book:

"Of course Lucretia would find the idea of her grandmother being intensely passionate and stubborn, when she herself looks like she could suck a softball through a stove pipe".

Psychic Blues is a thoroughly enjoyable read for a straight guy with a sense of objectivity, but would probably slightly offend the sensibilities of everyone else, to some degree. Words like "broad" and "dame" dangle within range of most reflections of characters throughout its pages, which are obviously written by a very cynical and jaded skeptic; It's self-proclaimed and convivial most of the time, and I'm sure many readers would enjoy the "unmitigated truth" of Edward's observations about fat goth chicks, etc.

New Age communities can be very predictable, especially in California, I imagine. I just couldn't really look at the author as another Houdini, sincerely exposing another form of exploitation. I more often found him to be bit mean-spirited and shallow, and a somewhat lovable curmudgeon at best, especially with the inherent schadenfreude in his prank seminar on the sonic frequencies of whales or dolphins being usurped by angry aliens, or some such.

Beneath the surface of such calculated criticisms, is a very sincere attempt to find a middle ground between the two types of "True Believers" on each side of the spectrum. One type needs no explanation to believe, another couldn't be swayed by any explanation, no matter how convincing. However, I'd say that's one aspect that fell short. In all of the self-congratulatory feats of applied psychology, which are apt and in abundance, there is maybe a total of a page's worth about "the law of averages" and "synchronicity", and nothing about the possibility of a real psychic actually existing. Poor Mark Edward spent his time surrounded by what he basically portrays as gullible, borderline psychotic idiots for decades, never finding what he thought was a sincere practitioner. He himself dealt in vagueries and extrapolation, and came upon some rather miraculous conclusions. A woman did find her keys in a diaper box thanks to him. Some other people found their keys in their cars thanks to him. Using tarot and a stack of random pictures, he did arrive at some rather remarkable conclusions, even if they were generalizations. Which is neither here nor there. I didn't expect him to believe in psychic phenomena, but Edward did sort of touch on the power of subconscious projections, but when he did, and my ears were perked up, he touched on ideomotor responses, occasionally various mentalism/trickery, and then quickly moved back to telling amusing anecdotes about dumb people.

I've definitely been to some fake psychics, and endured my fair share of annoyance from resolutely, religiously naive new age circles, what Edward terms "shut-eyes", but to look at this book as any sort of "good deed", which is what is implied in the press clips, would be silly. There are some scruples, in there, especially with regard to the exploitation and "selling out" of the Psychic Friends Network, but much more often "Psychic Blues" strikes much harder as a bit of self-congratulatory nefariousness, mixed with exacting revenge for all his years of doing "readings" for a wide variety of people of various backgrounds, who all show a very dark and disgusting side of human nature (I am surprised Eddie Murphy didn't sue). This is more a book for bitter/brutally honest people to live vicariously through, and to bask in the sharp insults thrown in pretty much every sitter's direction. Between the Psychic Friends Network experiences, personal readings, parties, and the surprisingly scarce info on his seances, there's never really a moment that isn't surrounded by caricatures, even if the appropriate gestures were made for being respectful to the dead. Still, the over-arching theme is, if you ever went to one of Mark Edwards' readings because you're dealing with the loss of a loved one, or some other trauma, lo and behold, the joke's on you!

Still, there is a bit of Mark Edward in all of us, and surely more than three decades of this kind of business would have us in similar shoes. Devout psychic loonies or their sneaky skeptic equivalent, they're all kids in the schoolyard doing stupid things to impress eachother. For all of the implicit coldness, it is actually refreshing to read a narrative that is written in a vividly fluid and picturesque manner, while also being somewhat impersonal and to the point. As a student of various elements of psychology that definitely dip some toes in "parapsychology", this is a very rewarding and animated read, with enough shifting angles to keep things dynamic throughout.