The Power of the Dark Side: Creating Great Villains, Dangerous Situations, and Dramatic Conflict Book

I noticed the overall rating of this book and had to check what's going on in the reaction to it. It is a great book on three counts, points perhaps missed in some reviews that personally I find puzzling.

If you have a degree in psychology or otherwise read on abnormal psychology, maybe you have the insights of this book.

Having looked at those books only cursorily, I think, probably audaciously, that there is something worldlywise in this book that is missing in psychology texts.

It is not a book to make your villain bigger and badder. Nope. Great stories seem to say something more than the magnificently executed spectacles ' which are of course spectacularly important in their stories. Great stories are insights that gently and silently lead that spectacle into a lesson about human consciousness, a lesson we keep.

In my opinion this book has a secret subtitle, "Substructures of dark minds: An etiology of twisted thought."

And that brings me to the third point why this book is unique. I will be surprised if most aspiring writers can have experienced this wide a variety of psychologies or even one. It is not that perverse psycholgies are rare, they even hide in hallowed halls under pretenses and thrive on the aridity of artificially created ignorance of twisted motives by authority, secrecy, and deceitful purposes.

Innocence, raised in natural idealism has no way of predicting this and searches for an answer in the wrong direction, a little too long. This book is a window into minds that are different from the unconditional love and honesty one experiences within a family or another nurturing environment.

Frankly, with the way the world is moving, I feel no kid should leave home without something like this to augment their radar.

I hope this helps ' and reminds us to create stories reinforcing such semioses before it is late.