Here are the protagonists:
- Jim Morrison of the hippie band The Doors, by some estimates one of the best rock singers of his generation, and a stunning lyricist to boot, whose early promise was cut short when he died at age 27 in a bathtub in Paris, generally agreed to have been as a result of a heroin overdose.
- Michael Hutchence, Aussie singer and lyric writer for the band INXS, one of the beautiful people of the late 20th century, whose early promise was cut short when he died in his thirties by strangling himself with his belt.
Enough material there in the real world to produce one regular-sized well-researched book, one would have thought. But Jacqueline Murray, self-appointed "international psychic," was not satisfied with the material world version. She has dipped her pen into the astral ether and come up with a whopping 713-page "explanation" of why and how each man died, revealing their deepest secrets and those of their nearest and dearest
- all delivered with full articulation (no mysterious groans, ectoplasmic manifestations or tappings) by the dead to Murray's head.
I'm sorry, folks, but this reviewer's mind boggles. Yet I am sure Murray's book will find a large readership. I note that it is all over the relevant blogs.
Morrison has still got a strange, one could say macabre, following, and interest in his twisted life will persist, along with appreciation of his monolithic musical talents. Hutchence may be most famous for in essence bequeathing his only child to music entrepreneur Bob Geldof and leaving behind an estate so convoluted and possibly manipulated by his so-called friends that his own child may never be a beneficiary of his considerable intellectual property.
Hutchence was the subject of more earth-bound speculation in a non-fiction book (also reviewed on Curled Up with a Good Book) -
The Scent of Desire by Rachel Herz. Herz cites a traumatic brain injury caused when Hutchence was battered by a taxi driver. The result was a loss of his sense of taste and smell (the two being inextricably linked) which led to a deep depression and could explain not only the star's volatile outbursts of anger, but his later suicide (believed to have been an autoerotic act). The brain trauma could also explain why he allowed those around him to macro-manage his wealth and plot to obtain it after his sadly predictable early demise.
Morrison's life has been biographized many times, both while he was on the terran sphere and afterwards, but this is certainly the first time he has been channeled and allowed to speak for himself. If you read the book (and you will if you are a die-hard fan willing to scrape the media - and mediumistic - barrel for any word of your hero), you will find out what really happened in that Paris bathtub.
This is not a book for those of us who like our facts mingled with other facts. It is produced by AuthorHouse, a respectable self-publishing press that will undoubtedly profit from its offbeat, sensational subject matter. I wish them and Murray all the best.