i quit this one. Awful sentence structure and his use of adjectives feel random. Sorry guy. ( )

I read this book many years ago. I recently ran across it on Goodreads and remembered - yeh, I read that one.

What stayed with me is that hell is whatever you think hell is, so when you die, if you go there, what happens to you is what you expected to happen to you when alive.

There's also a story of a witch's coven and a Christian group that doesn't like the witches and the idea of dying and being resurrected. . . .

That's what I remember, anyway. ( )

La mort est un chat noir au regard insondable. Le sursaut d'une grenouille décérébrée par un biologiste. La main coupée et momifiée d'une fillette en robe bleue, assassinée par un prédicateur. La mort est à la fois horreur et tentation... A Maywell, petite ville de Pennsylvanie, la mort est tapie au fond des coeurs. Rapide et silencieuse comme un félin, ou violente et crépitante comme un brasier, elle s'alimente de la peur, de la haine et des remords. A Maywell, en 1987, s'affrontent deux communautés : les fidèles de Frère Simon Pierce et les disciples de Constance Collier. Les premiers se disent chrétiens et haïssent les seconds parce qu'ils font l'amour, dansent au clair de lune et ont d'étranges pouvoirs… ( )

This is a book with mixed qualities. It has a plot and the plot moves along; it has interesting ideas; and it has characters who are, some of them, one step above cardboard. But it is also relentless propaganda. All the good characters are pagans or Christians sympathetic to pagans, while all the fundamentalist Christians are despicable wife-beaters and child-murderers and jumpers to conclusions, some of them half-mad, all of them bullies and impervious to reason. For some reason, it makes the book less enjoyable and more like slogging through a lecture. ( )

I have a great sentimental affection for this book, since it put me on a spiritual path which was important to me for many years. This is a fictional story about a coven of modern day Wiccan witches (based on the "Circle Sanctuary" in Wisconsin, which is a real organization). It's a mystery which portrays the pagans as the good guys, the first time I'd read something with that sort of a spin. It was also the first time I'd heard about modern pagan spirituality - all my previous experience had been with books about the Salelm witch trials and such, and it was a big revelation to discover that there were people who called themselves Witches, and had a rich spiritual life outwith Christianity. In the dedication, the author listed contact information for Circle Sanctuary. I wrote to them, and this opened up a whole new world for me, introducing me to pagan beliefs for the first time. The book itself is really not anything special, but I consider it to be worth reading because it was one of the first that I read which portrayed pagans in a positive light. ( )