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Blair Witch: The Secret Confession of Rustin Parr by D.A. Stern
Book Summary InformationAuthor: D.A. Stern Edition: Paperback Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published) Published: 2000-08-01 ISBN: 0743411536 Number of pages: 160 Publisher: Pocket
Book Reviews of Blair Witch: The Secret Confession of Rustin ParrBook Review: Whatever It Was That Rustin Parr Confessed...You Won't Find it Here Summary: 3 StarsJournalist D.A. Stern gets a call that his 87 year-old friend Dominick Cazale has been hospitalized, incurring severe burns over 30% of his body after setting the fire to his Miami home and killing his wife Mary. After arriving in Miami, Stern receives a journal Cazale had kept of the final weeks leading up to the fire.
Reading from the journal Stern discovers that after Dominick and Mary returned from a vacation in Burkittsville, Maryland (the center of the Blair Witch legends), the woman developed mental disorders, reducing her to become a shut-in and hysterically delusional, with strange markings soon developing on her body. After Dominick found her chasing a cat she had lured inside, he writes how he became increasingly worried about the risk Mary posed as a danger both to herself and to others.
In addition to the Cazales' misfortune upon returning from Burkittsville, Stern also discovers that Dominick, a former Roman Catholic priest, once was the pastor of that town. Specifically, Cazale was there in May 1941. It was during that time that the remains of the bodies of seven missing local children were found in the basement of the home belonging to a recluse named Rustin Parr. Another child who was missing, Kyle Brody, would turn up claiming Parr had taken him too, keeping him alive only to witness the violation and murder of the others. An acquaintance of Parr's and the closest thing he had to a friend, Cazale wrote in his journal that he was the last person to speak with the man, and that he had told him the real and full truth of what had happened out there in those woods.
Ultimately THE SECRET CONFESSIONS Of RUSTIN PARR is an interesting but lackluster addition to the Blair Witch 'mythos.' Stern developed an even paced and intriguing plot, then gets it sidetracked with nostalgia until it simply peters out and fails to deliver anything worthwile. The book itself is short, and half of it comprises Dominick Cazale's journal. Although supposedly panic-stricken over the degeneration of his wife, Cazale, however, prefers rather to reminisce about his mother and two brothers and their old Baltimore neighborhood. When he writes about Burkittsville, he spends too much time on the diffulties he, as a "city boy," had to overcome living out in the country. He also dwells far too long over the mutual infatuation between him and Kyle Brody's mother, Carol. That which we are waiting for: Parr's confession, isn't brought up until the near end, where it is surrounded by melodrama and vague enough to be considered simply an intimation.
What Stern wrote here could become the basis for a very good story about a young priest's early ministry. But it certainly isn't good horror.
Summary of Blair Witch: The Secret Confession of Rustin ParrIN MAY 1941, A HERMIT NAMED RUSTIN PARR TOLD POLICE HE MURDERED SEVEN CHILDREN IN BURKITTSVILLE, MARYLAND.BUT THE NIGHT BEFORE HE WAS HANGED, PARR TOLD HIS PRIEST AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT STORY. NOW -- NEARLY SIXTY YEARS LATER -- THE DETAILS OF RUSTIN PARR'S FINAL CONFESSION CAN BE REVEALED. It was the most shocking crime imaginable: the kidnapping and brutal murder of seven innocent children. The particulars of Rustin Parr's crime made the case even more horrifying: the ritual nature of the killings, the strange symbols carved into the children's bodies, Parr's revelation that voices in his head told him to commit his foul deeds. Some whispered that Parr's crime was just the latest in a series of murders attributed to Maryland's infamous Blair Witch. But when Parr went to the gallows, all agreed that justice had been served; evil had been put to rest. All, that is, but one man. Dominick Cazale was the priest who heard Parr's confession. He heard Rustin, a man who before the killings was generally acknowledged as the gentlest of souls, talk about the bodies found in his basement, and about Kyle Brody, the eleven-year-old sole "survivor" of the killings. What Parr told Cazale that night was a shockingly different account of what happened to those seven children. Yet the words that passed between the two men remained a mystery..until now.
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