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Things get extremely creepy from here. The “Rostov Lights”, Dan learns, are unexplained multicolored balls of light that appear in a nearby field at nighttime. They don’t come every night, and they don’t always stay for long.
No one knows what they are, where they come from, or what they mean. No one can explain why some people can see them, and other people cannot. Many people have set out to explore these lights, and readers get to hear details of all their stories, and these “mini-stories” within the main story line are fascinating. Bad things seem to happen when a person goes too far into the field, searching for the lights.
When Dan first finds his wife, he tries his best to convince her to leave Rostov, and come back home with him. Out of nowhere, a man who came from a busload of people that were on a tour to see the Rostov Lights starts shooting into the crowd. A massacre happens, and it serves as the readers first example of how sometimes, the Rostov Lights make people go insane. You do eventually get the back story about the shooter, and it’s quite bizarre.
Rostov, Texas, is just a teeny little town, out in the middle of nowhere, but it is starting to gain attention because of this massacre. News crews arrive, to report on the shooting, the town, and the mysterious lights. Dan and his wife find themselves on the run from the press, who are hunting them because they want “the story” about their part in the shooting that happened. All this attention is unwanted by the locals, and is also unwanted by the U.S. Military, who just so happen to have some local, and mysterious, bases set up near the unexplained Rostov Lights.
I can’t decide which is spookier, the idea of little balls of colored light that dance in a field and make people go crazy, or the idea that the U.S. Military is somehow involved with the creepy little lights. Readers get to be inside the head of Dan, and several other characters, and in the process, get to “experience” many different points of view about these Rostov Lights.
For more information about this book, you can go check out the official page for the Shimmer book. You can read an exerpt from the book, and watch a video about it. Or, you can go to David Morrell’s website, and find out more about the author, his work, and stuff he has going on right now.
Fun Fact: David Morrell is the author who wrote “First Blood” and “Rambo, First Blood Part II”.
What exactly are the “Rostov Lights”? Reader get to discover lots of things about them, but, by the end, you get to decide for yourself what you believe them to be. In the back of the book, after the story ends, there is a section called “Afterword”. Here, Morrell explains some of his inspiration for this book.
It seems there actually is a little town in Texas called Marfa, that has a history of having mysterious lights appear. Morrell created an extremely detailed, suspenseful, and creepy story out of a few newspaper clippings, and some speculation. I will leave you to search google for “Marfa Lights”, and decide what you think about those as well. To me, just the thought that things like the “Rostov Lights” might actually exist is extremely creepy, and exciting, all at the same time.
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This sounds like an interesting book. I’ve been to Marfa, but not at dusk when you are most likely to see the lights. It is in the desert of West Texas and I’ve heard theories that it has something to do with rocks expanding and contracting or something. I don’t know.
Comment by Nathan Lott 11.19.09 @ 12:46 pmLeave a comment
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