Jeb, a lecturer at Harvard, meets a mysterious pilot with a map who is murdered, the eyes sucked out of his skull while he is still alive. Jeb, shaken by the horror and wanting no more of it, is asked by the faculty at Harvard to travel to Colombia in search of ancient emeralds. In an Indian dialect, the map tells of their secret location. A Monster guards this secret for which the eyes of humans are sacrificed. General Junco, his contact person, finds refuge with an obscure woman, while his red-headed wife Lourdes, once a great beauty, is served nightly by a shadow lover. Jeb is provided a house in which to live with a housekeeper, Lucy, who remains strangely distant. His lady back home, Courtney, teaches at Sarah Lawrence. Lola, the beautiful secretary of General Junco, commands his attention, providing a momentary distraction from the horror that awaits him. An assassin has been sent to Colombia by Geneva emerald dealers, who, though leaving many bodies, is never seen. Jeb guesses the source of the Monster's emeralds, a dark rainforest where Indians have been tortured for centuries, and again enslaved and murdered during the nineteen hundreds by the rubber barons, a horror called the Devil's Paradise. Lucy, the housekeeper, follows him. She is caught by thugs and deposited among the rotting corpses to await the sucking out of her eyes. From nowhere, the unseen assassin appears and frees her. She finds Jeb in the rainforest and together they elude the Monster, escape warring Indians, the descendants of those who were tortured, survive an electric eel, avoid the drug lords, and finally fall through the ground into a cave filled with skeletons, and gold-and-emerald artifacts, from which there appears to be no escape. Only after a cruel twist of fate is the shocking truth of this green horror revealed.

This book tells a true story. An airplane crash sends a dying pilot to the hospital. From death and darkness, he rises to brilliant colour, entering upon a Romantic passion that may only be described as profound. He defies injury, surviving, always surviving, winning the companionship of ladies, until he meets one who gives him an offer he can't refuse The narrative includes the crafting of poems, too, for we cannot have love without poems.

Haunted by the horror of death, Kiltie Hartley emerges from a troubled past. He is sent to an Episcopalian school in the tidewater of eastern Virginia. Into the conventional society celebrated by prep school he does not fit. His final year at a public high school is darkened by deepening alienation. The shadow of death which swallowed him up during his early life catches up with him again the following year in college. Like a snake, the darkness of death coils itself around him, suffocating him in its grip. Resistance-not wanting to be forced to do anything by anyone-pitches him into another direction. Far from home, the boy travels, physically and emotionally. He survives. Is that all? No. He survives in style

A true story The world in which the child finds himself is one of vivid and wondrous beauty, and horrifying ugliness, too, that thrills with its suggestion of evil. The father, old enough to be a granddaddy, prides himself a self-made man, likes to dress well and doesn't take crap. The younger mother, a former school teacher, can be teasingly friendly: at other times, as coldly indifferent as ice. School proves difficult. Neither parent is ever satisfied, not even with passing. By the fourth grade, the boy is confined to the principal's office every afternoon. And on the bus, required to sit in plain sight on the heater by the driver, this for fighting. Military school faces him at age eleven. Fun with girls leads to an obsession with sex and daring escapades. However, the cadet's growing sense of abandonment imposes a death sentence upon him: he envisions a hanging. A shadow looming, this hanging spells trouble. To parents who are stunned, outraged, and deeply saddened he returns. The child survives, most of him does; we do not leave childhood without sacrificing something. At the very end, he is saved in a way that is not unexpected, yet still astonishing

Due to the very old age and scarcity of this book, many of the pages may be hard to read due to the blurring of the original text.

Due to the very old age and scarcity of this book, many of the pages may be hard to read due to the blurring of the original text.