 |
Guests |
| A fictional horror novel about Molokans by Bentley
(Tolmasoff) Little When Gregory Tomasov wins the lottery, he turns his back on Southern California and takes his mother, his wife and three children back to his home town of McGuane, Arizona. But the idyllic small-town life he so desperately wants for his family doesn't materialize. Something else is waiting for him in McGuane instead. Something strange. Something frightening. Something that is making the inhabitants of McGuane die. Neither Gregory nor most of the other local residents understand what is happening to their town. But his mother and the other Russian members of her Molokan church do. Uninvited guests have arrived in McGuane. Guests that cannot be seen. Cannot be heard. And cannot be stopped. -- www.ains.net.au/~gerlach/little.htm#17 |
Order from Amazon.co.uk (England) Price: £4.79
Phoenix,
Arizona , 28 January, 1999
Too Many Errors--very poor
Russian, Molokan mis-information
I am an American-Molokan historian and web publisher who is attempting
to correct much of the mis-information published about Molokans
(Russian Spiritual Christians), especially on the web. A full review of
Guests will appear on the Molokan Home
Page . As a fictional pulp horror novel, Guests is alright, but
readers should know that it contains too much mis-information about
Molokans and most all the Russian phrases are misspelled. This is NOT a
good book to learn about Molokans unless you know where the errors and
mis-representations are. Little was not raised as a Molokan, but was
exposed to this close-knit religious culture through friends and
relatives on his mother's side. Guests contains many
Russian religious and cultural phrases, which, if you don't know the
errors, add cultural flavor and color to this fictional story. On the
one hand, I welcome Molokans publishing about their Molokan culture, on
the other hand, Little, who is half-Molokan, should have invited
Molokan elders and scholars to proofread and correct the blatant
errors. Most conservative Molokans will be shocked by Little's exposure
of Molokan culture and religion, while most others, like me, will be
amused that it was written at all. Guests was
somewhat educational to me. I didn't know about the house ghost ("old
man ghost"). As fiction, many of the circumstances are contrived and
much rich detail is missing, for example the preacher's funeral was too
brief. Although Little camoflaged the identity of his main characters,
refferences to other names--Mohoff's gas station, for example--actually
existed and probably should have also been fictionalized. See the
Molokan Home Page for a list of errors and mis-representations. E-mail
me if you have comments.