Night Summons

Review of Anita Gentry's Night Summons Reviewed by Charles T. Tart IONS Senior Research Fellow Gentry, Anita. Night Summons. New York: St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0-312-14691-4. Hardcover, $ 22.95. Most IONS members have run into heated and irrational op-position to some of our ideas about the wonderful possibilities we have as humans, and the research that is starting to support this wider view. The strength of such opposition, unfortunately, usually seems inversely proportional to the person's knowledge, i.e., the stronger the criticism, the less the person actually knows about what they are opposing. As an investigator of a number of human potential areas, I have personally run into this discouraging kind of opposition more times than I would like to remember. I've never been easily dis-couraged, though. Even the trials of life have their good sides, though, and I would like to tell you about an enjoyable outcome of this situation. If you want to read a good thriller, read the just published novel, Night Summons, by Anita Gentry. It's about a handsome parapsychologist at a major university who gets a lot of flak from narrow-minded psychologists in his university department. It's quite a good mystery and action novel, as well as dealing with many issues of interest to IONS members. One of the chief characters is Athena Dawes, a detective-in-training who temporarily takes a job as a secretary in a psychology department to discover why Suzie, a friend of hers who had worked there was beaten and almost killed. Dawes is amazed by the gossip and plotting against Professor and parapsychologist Laszlo Hon-vagy that she overhears. Of course the fact that the author, Anita Gentry, worked as a secretary in my department at UC Davis for a while must be just a coincidence.... Night Summons is presented as a work of fiction, and my colleagues never actually hired a hit man to get rid of me - that I know of. And if I seem to recognize some of the characters in the novel I'm sure that's just projection on my part.... All coincidence, except for (if you'll allow me one small projection) the handsome part ...... Enjoy this story, and tell your friends about it. This is a very good first novel. As to the serious part, my blurb on the cover reads "I had trouble putting Night Summons down -- the action was so intriguing and full of surprises. It's fiction, of course, but I had to say, sadly, the Gentry's depiction of narrow-mindedness about parapsychology among professors, who we expect to be well-informed and open-minded, is too often too true."