Mindflower

Christopher McDaniel - just an ordinary twelve-year-old boy walking home after school. What happens next makes Cody Phillips' Mindflower a very tough read, because with tendrils snaking throughout the upper echelons of American society a dark secret perpetuates a repeated and heinous crime. For Paula McDaniel, that day alters her life irrevocably, threatening to drag her towards a dramatic and harrowing conclusion. Like Hubert Selby Jr's The Room, Mindflower can, at times, make the reader want to look away, but that would be to turn a blind eye to what is, perhaps, the worst possible crime: the absolute corruption of the innocent. Mindflower, with its occult underbelly, is a powerful and oftentimes brutal read.