Twilight Darkness #7 Play to Live, #8 Blood Red Roses, and #9 Demon Tree

In Twilight Where Darkness Begins #7, Play to Live, Joey is new to Norwich.  Nothing is more important to Norwich than football, and the Norwich team is on a huge winning streak.  Joey makes the team, and he notices that horrific injuries to the opposing team occur during each game.  Joey also notices that Mr. Wynn, owner of the sporting goods store, has a strange hold over the team.  Joey begins to suspect something evil at play.

This is another suspenseful book, and it is a very good story.

In Twilight Where Darkness Begins #8, Blood Red Roses, Kate places a deposit on an antique mirror for her bedroom.  Tracy, a selfish snobbish girl, tries to force the shopkeeper to sell the mirror to her instead.  When the shopkeeper refuses, Tracy is livid.  Kate hangs the mirror in her bedroom and immediately has bloody nightmares.  Tracy steals the mirror, and Kate's nightmares end.  Tracy begins acting strange, and Kate realizes that the mirror is evil. Can Kate save Tracy before something horrible happens?

The scene in which Tracy tries to get the mirror sold to her reminds me of Lettie Briggs and the study lamp in the Dana Girls book, By the Light of the Study Lamp.  Imagine the turn that book could have taken if the study lamp had been possessed by an evil spirit.  I would love to see Lettie possessed!  As it is, she already seems possessed at times.

Page 11 captures perfectly how someone feels when dreading an event that is coming the next day.  "It was Sunday morning already.  Monday, and the impossibility of avoiding the other girl at Shelter Cove High School, was already creeping up like a poisonous fog."

The ending of this book is horrifying.  This is an excellent book.


In Twilight Where Darkness Begins #9, Demon Tree, Maggie comes to live with her grandparents in an isolated small town.  Maggie sees a black shadow at night that beckons to her.  Everyone is miserable and mean and will not explain why.  It's as though something is holding the entire town captive.

The book is good but not that scary.  However, the title of the book is unsettling, and that set the stage for me getting spooked, when I should have realized what was really happening.

I was reading the book on the evening of September 2, when three different times I heard strange noises from different parts of the room. One time was a fairly loud sound like something hitting the window, and another time a sound apparently came from inside the dresser on the other side of the room.  I remember turning around in my chair and staring perplexed at my dresser.  I can't remember where the third sound was.  I did not imagine the sounds, but I also could not think of a logical explanation.  I was rather unnerved, even though I did not seriously think anything supernatural was involved.

A few hours later, I was trying to get to sleep when the mattress made a popping sound from the corner.  That unnerved me even more.  I woke up right before 7 AM the next morning.  I wasn't fully awake, but I was aware of my surroundings.  Suddenly, the mattress began moving up and down, jostling me.  It felt like something large was under my bed trying to push the mattress up, like I had been thrust into a horror movie. It was unreal.  I immediately put my foot against the wall, which was shaking hard.  I knew it was an earthquake, but it really scared me.  After the shaking stopped, I got up and went online immediately where I learned that we had just had a magnitude 5.8 earthquake, the largest in state history.  I was nervous for around half the day.

A few days later, I checked recent earthquakes and discovered that all three sounds from the night before had been caused by small earthquakes.  Click on the image to see a larger version.

My time zone is five hours behind the times stated, so the three earthquakes listed below the magnitude 5.8 earthquake are the three from the evening of September 2 and must have caused the three strange noises.  At least I had a logical explanation for all of the sounds, with the exception of the mattress popping.  I can rest easy knowing that my house is not possessed.  I'll always remember I was reading Demon Tree when all of these earthquakes occurred.