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Deep Shadows: A Decade of Trickery by Dee Christopher Review

One book, 275 pages and $75 bucks. Is it gem or is it rubble? Stay tuned to find out.

Effect/Method

Being a book, of course, there's no simple single effect or method. There are multiple effects, techniques, essays, etc. All the standard mentalism "stuff" is covered: ESP Cards, metal bending, verbal influence techniques, predictions, two-person codes, etc.

Generally speaking, the effects are not necessarily revolutionary or new, so the question becomes "how innovative are the methods?" I'd say that the answer to that is everywhere from extremely innovative to hardly innovative at all.

There are six main sections:

1. Devices & Gimmicks
2. Mentalism Effects
3. Linguistic Bending
4. Two Person Codes
5. Subtleties
6. Essays on Performance

The devices and gimmicks section was the "worst" part of the book. On more than one occasion, the text referred to photographs that were not there making it difficult to understand the description. This, of course, is a product quality issue, but I mention it here in the "method" section to clarify why I can't give you a decent analysis of some of the methods. Other gimmicks simply don't/won't work as explained.

Six:six comes to mind. Based on the description, I cannot see this working at all. First, you deal 6 index cards onto the table. However one of them is a gimmick (much like the six card repeat gimmick) that has five cards inside of it. So the gimmick is 7 cards thick with tape holding the two outer cards together like a hinge. Christopher tells us to deal it onto the table next to the other five single unprepared index cards. He claims that the extra thickness, tape and folded nature of the gimmick will go unnoticed while it sits next to the other regular cards on the table. B.S. folks.

Assuming you get past that point — you won't — the handling is very confusingly written, so much so that I could not figure out how to correctly use the gimmick. That's a recurring theme throughout the book.

On the other hand, there was plenty of usable material in the book that I think anyone interested in mentalism will appreciate and possibly use. I felt that he had some very clever and useful ideas in the Linguistic Bending and the Two Person Code section. But even in this section he refers things in the text that are simply not there. For example, on page 240 he says, "The reason I've 'bolded' the word circle above is . . ." Yet nowhere in the text is there a case of the word circle being bolded, so I'm not sure what he's referring to. Again . . . a recurring theme throughout the book.

In the Mentalism Effects section, there were a few gems. The Dichotomy Deck comes to mind. It's a gaffed deck you can create which allows for a nice handling of the Curry classic Out of This World plot. In the Subtleties section, I found a few moments that I felt were interesting and may be worth your attention. As mentioned briefly a moment ago, the Linguistic Bending section also had a few gems. It stars with a crash course in basic metal (i.e., silverware) bending. Following that are a handful of clever ideas regarding the proper scripting to get maximum bang-for-buck when the spoon bends.

All in all, there are some good (great-ish) ideas that are workable, doable, etc. as explained. Then there are a fair amount of ideas that don't work as explained and/or have missing photos and/or are poorly explained.

Ad Copy Integrity

For the most part, the ad copy just mentions the effects in the book and the contents in general. There weren't really any outrageous claims. However, when a lot of the material in the book is unusable because of poor product quality (e.g., missing images, poorly written descriptions, etc.), it's hard to say that the ad copy is solid.

Product Quality

This, to me, is where the book took the biggest hit. For $75, all of the images that are claimed to be there had better be there. I get that typos happen. Speaking as an author/publisher myself, it happens. However, on well over 75% of the pages of this book there are either typos, grammar errors, structure errors or punctuation errors. I point this out because oftentimes it affected my ability to understand the material.

Final Thoughts

My biggest complaint about this book was the sloppiness or carelessness with which it seemed to be compiled. There were way too many cases where the lack of clarity made it difficutl or even impossible to do/understand the effect or method. If you can't understand the book, why read it? Granted, the book wasn't horrible. It had a lot of problems and a lot of the material was just not explained or taught well, but there are plenty of well-enough explained items and ideas that will interest most people who are into mentalism, but for $75 bucks, I'd expect a lot better. If this book were less expensive, I might have given it a 3-ish star rating, but as it is . . .

Final Verdict:
2.5 Stars with a Stone Status of Grubble (a fair amount of gems surrounded by a lot of rubble — rubble that might be a gem if I could understand it).