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Monday, 14 June 2021

#BlogTour The Shadow Man by Mark Brownless

 It's my turn on the BlogTour the Shadow man by Mark Brownless.

About the Author

Mark Brownless lives and works in Carmarthen, West Wales. He has been putting ideas on paper for some years now but only when the idea for The Hand of an Angel came to him in the autumn of 2015 did he know he might be able to write a book. Mark likes to write about ordinary people being placed in extraordinary circumstances, is fascinated by unexplained phenomena, and enjoys merging thriller, science fiction and horror. Follow @markbrownless on Twitter, on Facebook, on Youtube

About the book

Idyllic memories? A perfect childhood? A secret buried for thirty years... None of us could remember why we drifted apart – we were always so close at school…

That was thirty years ago, and I hadn’t thought of my school friends in all that time – it was like they’d never existed. Then the dreams started. Dreams that I knew I’d had before. Horrific dreams of fear and fire and death.

Dreams of a ghostly urban legend who seemed to hang over my home village like an evil spirit – the Shadow Man. I’d begun to remember, and I knew we had to go back. What happened to us back then? Do we really want to know? Are we ready to face the Shadow Man again?

Review

Philippa knows in her gut that the dreams she is having are connected to something deeply disturbing, something evil. Somehow instinctively she also knows it is linked to some event when she was younger.

A mutual dream experience - perhaps if everyone is going through the same processing of emotions and memories at the same time. What could an event like that be triggered by and why would an old group of friends have the same kind of nightmares at the same time? What does their friend Janey know about it?

In fact Janey drums them all back together because she is determined to figure out what happened to them when they were younger. Have they all collectively been so traumatised that they have blocked out the truth?

It's a psychological thriller with a tinge of deep set fears and how we cope with trauma and said fears. The author hammers home how the human is the unreliable variable in any equation when it comes to memories. 

We only have space for a certain number of items in our short term memory and everything else is filed in long term, however not everyone has the same filing system. Retrieval can be partial or not at all, and even attached to other memories. On top of that our perception at the time of filing is framed through individual references and experiences, which explains why two people can experience the same event in a completely different way. The question is what exactly did they experience?

Buy The Shadow Man at Amazon Uk or go to Goodreads for any other retailer. Publisher ‏: ‎SpellBound Books pub date 13 Jun. 2021. Buy at Amazon com.

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