Where books are chronicled from beginning to end, and never stop being read.

Saturday, March 30, 2013

Shadowed Soul

Shadowed Soul by John M. Spagnoli
This is an intense, mind-boggling story of a man named Thomas Milton.

Thomas and his blind wife, Beth, aptly agree that she take their infant son and move in with her parents. It is a difficult decision and a sadly necessary one. Being diagnosed with a deep bipolar disorder, Thomas grapples with his own demon, the Shadowed Soul.

Bailey, his wife's seeing-eye dog, is his only source of comfort and connection to reality. As Thomas falls deeper into his manic-depressive state, there is an abysmal drop into the delusive reality that consumes his mind. It is strangely reminiscent of Jekyll & Hyde.

"Adrenaline rushed through my body with the same ferocity my thoughts raced. It was foolish to believe anything supernatural followed us, impossible. There were no such things as demons and monsters. The Shadowed Soul... As we walked I could see him in my mind's eye, tall, lanky and broken, walking through the night in a way that was not quite human, his face long and deathly white, a shattered lunatic grin sliced across his lower jaw as he loped behind me, his eyes dancing with red embers of hungry desire, his pockets full of ropes and chains and gags and his heart full of unkind desires."

John Spagnoli's own experience with manic-depression has given this story a disturbing sense of reality. This is an intricate mixture of the author's personal foundation and brilliant imagination. Shadowed Soul will drop the reader into a spiraling progression of one man's tormented psyche, and his arduous battle to progress beyond the limits of societal diagnoses. 

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