‘Berate me. Curse me! Chastise me. You know you want to’ - now you know I would never do such a thing ;) well not today anyway. I took your advise, Jaq’s therapy lesson no 1. Grit teeth – check! then I took a deep breath, ensured that calmness had surrounded me and that my patience was in place before I started. So here I am perfectly content with the twists taken in this chappie, that it left more questions than gave answers and with the fact that I will be doing the waiting thing all over again! Genius! You should charge, although we’ve already established I’m on the poorer scale of poor, although I have 1 hubby and 2 adult (debatable) teenagers all going cheap!


‘The world was slumbering, the telepath thought. Time to wake it up.’ Little did we know the significance/impact of this line. 'Leaving their corpses behind her as their tiny hearts stuttered and stilled in her wake.’ Talk about lull us into a false sense of security then hit us round the head with a 4 by 4! Great stuff!! You really are good at this you know that right?

I don't know what to write. Stunned, yes, I am that, but the word doesn't come close to what I feel right now.

Short chapter? Oh, I don't think so. I don't remember ever reading something that took hold of me so emotionally and smacked me around like a rag doll.

You lull us in with the idyllic scene of satiated lovers, give us fair warning with the introduction of the cold calculation of the puppetmaster initiating this nightmare only to whip us unmercifully into this massacre.

The mundane school day turned to a slaughter, the chore of going to the bank transformed into blunt murder, the execution of innocents by the physician that previously lived only to save them, the realization from a good man that things were darker than he could have ever imagined...

I don't know what to think, Ms. Jaq. Only you could make macabre into something so piercingly real and breath-stealing. So very, very well done.

Author's Response: I'm so relieved ... I wasn't sure about the choppiness of it all, whether or not I pulled off the quick swings from one perspective to the next. I wanted that almost surreal feel, that sense of the macabre juxtaposed with the domestic! Thank you, times a million!