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When one of them ends up dead at the other's home, an investigation is launched into their dark past, revealing a series of troubling stories from their childhood, adolescence and careers, throughout which pervades a sinister presence, an authorial entity with roots beyond our time or dimension - an entity with far-reaching designs.
Although Green Eyed Monster is not the type of book I would normally read, it held my interest and I enjoyed the story.
It delves into areas of evil with a supernatural concept, involving butterflies and the dark forces, of what I presume is the devil.
The story ventures in the human psyche, exploring the reasons for the choices humans make at the different crossroads in their lives, giving an explanation as to why a certain pathway is chosen, questioning fate.
The Green Eyed Monster starts with a scene involving a murder, investigation which leads into introducing the various characters involved in the story, divulging how their lives are entwined and directed by manipulation of a dark force, which is working behind the scenes.
The Green Eyed Monster by Mike Robinson, is well written and holds the attention of it's reader through to the end.
Barry_G
Posted January 10, 2013
"It is a green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on." - William Shakespeare, Othello
"The Green-Eyed Monster" is not a murder mystery in the usual sense, but it does touch upon the mystery of why human
beings kill one another in the first place: anger, revenge, insecurity, fear - jealousy. In this regard, I suppose, the entirety of human
history is a murder mystery. This psychological thriller looks at the mysterious driving force behind the evil that befalls two men.
"There was a day in mid-April, 1971, when the sky over the Northern Californian town of Twilight Falls was deathly ill..." the author
tells us, and then describes the simultaneous birth of the two boys, each born in silence with a blue butterfly lodged in his throat.
The butterflies take flight, the baby boys are healthy, and miracles commence... People who have been depressed and suicidal
begin to recover; a boy who has been lost in the violent storm is found alive and well. Later in grade school, students who share a
classroom with the boys, Martin Smith and John Decker, seem to improve in their studies, gain strength and confidence in their lives.
But not all remains idyllic in Twilight Falls.
Their first-grade teacher, who later falls prey to their influence in a very negative way, describes the first time she meets the two boys,
who arrive in her classroom late on the first day of school:
***
They were attired in collared flannel shirts that inexplicably aged them beyond their tender years. One wore blue,
the other red. Their backpacks were slung over their left shoulders, their faces were chalky white and their eyes
absorbed the world through muscular prescription lenses. Given their similarity I thought they might be related; half-siblings, perhaps.
The two boys stared at me.
"What are your names?" I asked.
"JoMarny," they answered simultaneously. Somehow they appeared unaware of one another's presence.
***
Scientific research indicates that thousands of individual bees forming a hive, like ants forming a colony, behave as a single
organism, in the way that a Quaking Aspen forest covering hundreds of acres is merely a single organism: one root with thousands
of shoots. Could the minds of individuals similarly be of one mind, like a forest of Quaking Aspen? Might individuals share the same
thoughts and ideas, invent new things simultaneously on opposite sides of the globe, create similar works of art without the aid of
verbal communication?
It's probably easier for us to believe that aspen trees are shoots of the same organism; but ants? Bees? Humans? They all move
around. How could they be connected to the same "roots"? This concept requires an understanding that historically the Western
World has been taught to dismiss, and when faced with it, most of us still fail to see: that there is a psychic and physical connection
between us that defies detection by the human eye.
In "The Green Eyed Monster", we discover that a force "like the force that keeps magnets from touching one another" is
also the force that keeps the boys together, in the form of a mysterious Grandfather who is common to them both, an old man
who tells the survivor, Martin Smith:
"Both you and Becker were one higher consciousness, shared by two human bodies and savagely imprisoned by human
tendencies and emotions."
Aye, there's the rub: those damned human tendencies and emotions!
While his first book "Skunk Ape Semester" was in the ilk of "The X-Files", Mike Robinson's enthralling new novel is definitely
a nightmare that could have seeped from the empty darkness of Rod Serling's "The Twilight Zone" -- a twisted tale of two boys
who seem to share nearly identical thoughts, as revealed through their literary expression even in grade school, who grow up to be
famous authors, living in each other's shadow while loathing one another. Their animosity eventually leads to the death of one.
Enter Detective Richard Porter, a fan of their writing, who must untangle the circumstances of the death, while weighing
reports of other readers: a woman in Kansas who tried to sue the authors because she says she suffered some sort of psychotic
episode while reading one of their books, or a teenager in Wisconsin who stabbed his girlfriend thinking she was some sort of evil
character from a Becker or Smith novel.
This novel is as good as any you're going to find, a page-turner, an electron burner. I read this book in one sitting and decided
to write this review. Now, I'm going to go back and read the book again, just to enjoy every nuance of Mike Robinson's excellent writing.
Overview
When one of them ends up dead at the other's home, an investigation is launched into their dark past, revealing a series of troubling stories from their childhood, adolescence and careers, throughout which ...