Rogue angel

Rogue angel

Fiction

Paranormal fiction

Grooms, Bruce L.

2005

Boyer, Rick

http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/CNE/1.0/

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manuscripts (documents)

Text

61773

https://southernappalachiandigitalcollections.org/object/61773

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Rogue Angel is set in the mountains of Western North Carolina. The central character is Jackson McLean. He is forty-one years old, owns his own engineering firm, and has just lost his wife, Emily, to suicide (though she was dying of cancer). Racked with the emotional pain of losing his best friend and lover, Jackson turns to his old teenage friend, heroin. He is lured to a little private lake, nestled in the Smoky Mountains, the very spot where his wife killed herself, to do his first shot of heroin in many years. It is a place shrouded in ghost stories, mystery, and death, and the subject of four sketches left behind by Emily that were so detailed and strange that there was no way they could have been done in the week before her death as Jackson knew they had been. Though every fiber of his being is screaming for him to scrap his plan to get high, and even more so for him to stay away from Mills Lake, Jackson cannot say no to the strange pull he feels and ends up high beside the secluded lake, not caring whether he lives or dies. At this point he meets Archangel Jujauntray, the subject of one of Emily's paintings. He is a nine-foot tall creature shaped like a man but covered in beautiful fur, and he wants to experience the flesh of a human, to walk and talk and feel as a man would feel. However, the angel can only occupy human form as it approaches death and then only for an instant. But because Jackson was born in the same fold of spirits as Jujauntray, over nine hundred thousand years ago, the angel's spirit can reside in Jackson's body for almost a day before the central nervous system is destroyed as long as the body is close to death by means of a heroin overdose. Jackson really doesn't care about his body, he simply wants to communicate with Emily as promised by the angel, and he agrees to the exchange of bodies. As Jackson assumes the form of the angel, he is instantly aware of the angel's real plan and knows he has been duped, that in fact the angel had also lured Emily to her own death just so Jackson would show up there with the needed heroin. Jackson is furious, but he is unable to wield the newfound power within, and he is bombarded with millenniums and galaxies of the angel's stored knowledge. After hours of struggle, Jackson realizes that he has no real power over the physical world, that he can only change his own form and move at startling speed. By then, however, the angel is long gone with Jackson's body. He wreaks havoc on Jackson's world by first murdering his heroin dealer for the drugs he needs in order to keep Jackson's body high as well as an undercover cop. The angel murders another man, just to watch him die apparently. He then seduces Emily's mother, and in the process causes Emily's wealthy and arrogant father to suffer a fatal heart attack. Jackson is connected to the mind of this creature and experiences all these atrocities as if firsthand, and Jackson is determined to have his revenge, even if it means the death of his own body. But when he finally meets up with the angel, who has charmed his way into the home of Emily's best friend, Michelle, Jackson's revenge is not so easily carried out as the angel reveals the true nature of his "mission." Jackson must face the consequences of his own poor choices in life and make a decision that may affect so much more than his own pitiful existence. But first he must learn to trust the being called Archangel Jujauntray, who has uttered nothing but lies from the very beginning

2014-04-28

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