The Pagan Author, Rod Nave – Book Reviews

What begins as a search and rescue effort becomes a search and destroy struggle for survival in this remarkably creative dark adventure novel, The Pagan written by Rod Nave.

When a team of young volunteers charter a plane from Miami to Haiti to help victims of the recent 2010 earthquake, they unknowingly embark on an adventure of satanic proportions. Transported like helpless pawns in a past pact with the devil, the rescue team inadvertently enters a “quicksand-like sequence” of extraordinary events.

The dozen rescue workers land in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and gather their gear for a bus ride through the jungle as part of a mission to provide aid and medical assistance to villagers far from the city. They soon find themselves engulfed in a quagmire of natives resembling voodoo glazed zombies overpowering their bus. In an attempt to ward off the dangerous onslaught of natives attacking the bus, they throw food and supplies out of the bus windows to distract the crowd and allow them to escape. The driver, fearful of being overtaken by the crowd, drives the bus down a dirt road and up a gated driveway to an abandoned mansion. The group seeks refuge to gather their thoughts, take inventory of lost items, and create their next course of action, “Plan B”. As they explore their new surroundings, things get a little weird, weird, and disturbing. What appeared to be a random sequence of events resulting in the group being stranded in this dilapidated mansion turns out to be in fact a planned force on the part of the devil. The mansion, unknown at the time of entry, is actually the group leader’s grandfather’s house – a place where he lived as a child for a short time. Certain artifacts and events trigger his memory, and all too soon he realizes that his presence is the result of a deal made with the devil over 200 years ago by previous generations of his family. The Devil manifested in the form of a pagan doll to claim the debt to him of these mortal souls.

Rod Nave writes beautifully and crafts a novel that reads like a script for a truly scary movie. He cleverly contemporaryized his novel with a very recent event – the January 12, 2010 earthquake in Haiti, just five months before the time of this review. His use of dialogue and character development is brilliant. It creates a cast of believable characters in believable circumstances, even with the sad reality of having a cell phone available. It takes what is initially a predictable development of situations and makes masterful twists and surprises, drawing the reader into a dizzying world of blood-soaked voodoo spells, devil worship, Christian rituals, and sinister blue eyes. penetrants from The Pagan. Be careful, “Don’t drop the clay statue”, you wouldn’t want to see what happens if you crack its shell and release what’s inside. “Careful! Oh no… Oh my God!”