Daniel and Luke are the same person residing in the mind of a multiple personality. While at first the writing was good, and in the beginning the story line was well developed, 3/4 of the way through the author seemed to feel the need to mesh a credible tale with unnecessary sex, drugs and violence and from there the book went rapidly down hill.

I finished the book in a few hours and was left with the clear thought that there were oh so many better ones waiting to be read.

NO STARS FOR THIS ONE!

No Stars for this one!

What a twisted little book! DeLeeuw starts out with the tried and true practice of horrifying his readers with innocent children experiencing deeply disturbing events (something very common in most of our experiences) and moves on from there. I expected very few of the plot twists (except for the big reveal at the end, but it didn't lose much of the impact just because I saw it coming) and thoroughly enjoyed the unsettling mood. Good stuff! ( )

In which a multiple personality narrates his life inside his human host's psyche, telling us how he advanced from the warm and cuddly secret pal of childhood to the dreaded multiple personality status he later acheived. One concentration here was with his continuing battles with his dreaded enemy the psychoanalyst; another with his contempt for his host (and, indeed, humans in general). This is a great premise, and for a hundred pages or so, I was fascinated. After that, it basically fell apart into a typical millenial coming-of-age sex-and-drugs fest, as interesting as watching grass grow. Well, almost. At the end, he tried to get back on track with his premise, but by then I had ceased to care, and I didn't get the ending anyway. ( )

One morning as Luke is playing in the playground, he befriends another boy who he quickly identifies as Daniel. Daniel soon realizes that he has no memories before coming in contact with Luke and follows him home to become part of his life. But the other people surrounding Luke can't or don't see Daniel, and before long he realizes that he is, in fact, an imaginary part of the boy's consciousness. Living with his sometimes psychotic mother who has just gone through a messy divorce, Luke is far from being well-adjusted and Daniel becomes Luke's confidant and companion. But Daniel is not benign, and when Luke begins to spend time away from him, Daniel grows jealous and calculating, goading Luke into doing terrible things that soon have his mother seeking professional help for him. Soon Daniel is bottled up in Luke's consciousness and Luke is free to live his life. But underneath it all, Daniel is waiting for his opportunity to escape and wreak havoc once again. Discovering that he himself becomes stronger when Luke grows weaker, Daniel works this angle and continually seeks to keep Luke off balance, both emotionally and psychically, until the day that he can take over Luke's life as his own. Both dark and twisted, In This Way I Was Saved packs a psychological punch that will keep readers on the edge of their seats, asking themselves just what is real and what is not.

I have to say that although I loved the idea and premise of this book, the actuality started to go downhill for me rather quickly. There was a great potential for this to be a seriously creepy and disturbing book, and although there were flashes of dark brilliance in it, I felt that the author pulled a lot of punches and lost his footing in a number of ways. There were some really creepy and nightmare-inducing factors in this story, but it felt almost as if the author didn't go all the way with them and a lot of the supposed dark drama of the book really had much less of an impact than I would have liked.

It was never really clear to me while reading whether Daniel was some kind of horrifying imaginary friend, whether he was a part of Luke that remained hidden under the facade of everyday normality, or whether he was indeed a ghost. There was contradictory evidence for each of these scenarios, and the further I got into the book, the more these ideas clashed with each other, making a lot of this story unravel for me. At times Luke does things that Daniel makes him do, indicating that he was more of an influence on Luke rather than a part of him. But at other times it's as if Daniel is moving through Luke and doing things that he would not normally want to do, making me believe that Daniel was a facet of Luke that he tried to keep well hidden. Don't even get me started about the times Daniel does things independently of Luke; things that Luke is not even involved with. This was all confusing to me and didn't make much sense in terms of the story that DeLeeuw was trying to tell. It's one thing to suspend your sense of disbelief while reading a story like this but quite another to have the terms constantly changed within and amongst this imaginary environment and its players. Is it a story of the emergence of mental illness or a ghost story? This is one of the things that never became clear.

Another thing that bothered me was that a lot of it seemed very plebeian and mismatched. I just didn't understand why there were some scenes of intense horror and macabre mixed in with other rather ordinary accounts of teen sexuality, drug use and domestic drama. It felt off, and I think it made for a very uneven story. Towards the beginning of the book, there was a scene that I can only describe as horrifically penetrating, and after reading it, I came to expect that a certain level of creepiness would continue to permeate the book. But abruptly, it became a different kind of story filled with rather common elements and concerns that I grew rather bored with. I had thought that Daniel was supposed to be a dark and foreboding character constantly on the fringes of Luke's psyche. So why was he trying to feel up girls at a party and playing cruel jokes on Luke's mother? I just didn't get it. There was a sense that this story got away from its author, and that significant plot points were rather mismanaged, making for a story that was sometimes bizarre and sometimes confusing.

There was a whole subplot involving the mystery publishing house that Luke's mother owned and one of the tales they published about a doppelganger. I would have really liked to see more of this part of the story or for it to have had a little more focus in the narrative. I could see that DeLeeuw was trying to coalesce this part of the story into the story of Daniel, but this section was given short shrift and it didn't really fit in with what the story had become. Had this subplot turned in another direction and been more closely related to what was going on between Daniel and Luke, it might have ended up being a better read for me. Part of the reason the book wasn't more interesting to me was the fact that the things that went on between Luke and Daniel were never fully explained or defined. Maybe there was a subtle subtext that I was missing, but I don't really think so.

As the ending of the story was fully foreshadowed in the first few pages of the book, it wasn't at all a surprise for me, which bothered me as well. There was no mystery here, and since I knew how it was all going to wrap up anyway, I was hesitant to even read it through to the end. I'm not sure why the author chose to do things this way, but I, for one, didn't exactly feel like it was the best way the story could have been managed. The last few pages were particularly mind-boggling, as now the book had taken on a new shape that didn't fit within the world the author had created. The story of just what Daniel was, was constantly morphing, and I felt that if the author had just picked one path and stayed with it, it would have ended up being a much more affecting read. ( )

The blurb for this book describes it as being about the friendship between two boys, Luke and Daniel. Very quickly it becomes apparent that all is not as it might first have seemed, but it is quite obvious what is going on. I felt slightly disappointed, wondering if this was supposed to be a big twist later on and I had sussed it out immediately. However, to the author's credit, it turns out that this isn't supposed to be a surprise for later and what we have is an unusual take on dysfunctional families and psychological problems told from an interesting perspective. The plot is well-paced and gripping, with a sinister atmosphere, whiich I enjoyed, although it was never quite as creepy as I expected it to be, but that may have been because of the point of view of the narrator. ( )