Product Description

IN MAY 1941, A HERMIT NAMED RUSTIN PARR TOLD POLICE HE MURDERED SEVEN CHILDREN IN BURKITTSVILLE, MARYLAND.

BUT THE NIGHT BEFORE HE WAS HANGED, PARR TOLD HIS PRIEST AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT STORY.

NOW -- NEARLY SIXTY YEARS LATER -- THE DETAILS OF RUSTIN PARR'S FINAL CONFESSION CAN BE REVEALED.

It was the most shocking crime imaginable: the kidnapping and brutal murder of seven innocent children. The particulars of Rustin Parr's crime made the case even more horrifying: the ritual nature of the killings, the strange symbols carved into the children's bodies, Parr's revelation that voices in his head told him to commit his foul deeds. Some whispered that Parr's crime was just the latest in a series of murders attributed to Maryland's infamous Blair Witch. But when Parr went to the gallows, all agreed that justice had been served; evil had been put to rest. All, that is, but one man.

Dominick Cazale was the priest who heard Parr's confession. He heard Rustin, a man who before the killings was generally acknowledged as the gentlest of souls, talk about the bodies found in his basement, and about Kyle Brody, the eleven-year-old sole "survivor" of the killings. What Parr told Cazale that night was a shockingly different account of what happened to those seven children. Yet the words that passed between the two men remained a mystery..until now.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #829982 in Books
• Published on: 2000-08-01
• Released on: 2000-08-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

Customer Reviews

Well-crafted genre piece
This novel, which I assume must be tied into the sequel to "The Blair Witch Project," is a well-crafted piece of horror genre. Given the wretched state of horror fiction in general right now, that's high praise, indeed. "The Secret Confessions" is chopped and channeled, stripped down to the basics of spare prose, straightforward narrative and the final twist in the tale down the back stretch, where everything falls into place with little effort.

Rustin Parr is the recluse hung by the State of Maryland in 1941 for the murders of seven children in the basement of his house in a forest near Burkittsville. Parr's final confession is given to a young Roman Catholic priest who has some sins of his own that he carries with him from Burkittsville. Sixty years later, an acquaintance of the priest, who has long since renounced his holy orders, struggles to find out why the old man burned his house down, killing his beloved wife in the process and leaving him comatose with third-degree burns.

You won't need to be a Blair Witch fan to enjoy this novel, which can be read in one sitting. Stern gives you everything you need to understand what happened in Burkittsville and why the evil there found its way to the home of an elderly couple in Florida. Horror fiction rises or falls on a few key points. One involves whether the supernatural action arises from simple human frailty, a dark force entering through a chink in the armor of an otherwise decent, normal person. Good horror hews close to reality -- at all points, we must be able to empathize with the human targets of evil, which requires them to act and react in ways that we ourselves would react if faced with the same situation.

D.A. Stern accomplishes both of these goals here. He also doesn't condescend to the reader with a neatly-wrapped ending. You'll be able to figure out what happened in Rustin Parr's basement, but only if you pay attention, catch the clues Stern provides and put them together on your own.

For a book no doubt designed simply to keep public interest alive in a popular horror movie, D.A. Stern has gone above and beyond the call of duty. "The Secret Confessions," with its echoes of Nathaniel Hawthorne, is one of the best piece of horror fiction you will run across this year.

Whatever It Was That Rustin Parr Confessed...You Won't Find it Here
Journalist D.A. Stern gets a call that his 87 year-old friend Dominick Cazale has been hospitalized, incurring severe burns over 30% of his body after setting the fire to his Miami home and killing his wife Mary. After arriving in Miami, Stern receives a journal Cazale had kept of the final weeks leading up to the fire.

Reading from the journal Stern discovers that after Dominick and Mary returned from a vacation in Burkittsville, Maryland (the center of the Blair Witch legends), the woman developed mental disorders, reducing her to become a shut-in and hysterically delusional, with strange markings soon developing on her body. After Dominick found her chasing a cat she had lured inside, he writes how he became increasingly worried about the risk Mary posed as a danger both to herself and to others.

In addition to the Cazales' misfortune upon returning from Burkittsville, Stern also discovers that Dominick, a former Roman Catholic priest, once was the pastor of that town. Specifically, Cazale was there in May 1941. It was during that time that the remains of the bodies of seven missing local children were found in the basement of the home belonging to a recluse named Rustin Parr. Another child who was missing, Kyle Brody, would turn up claiming Parr had taken him too, keeping him alive only to witness the violation and murder of the others. An acquaintance of Parr's and the closest thing he had to a friend, Cazale wrote in his journal that he was the last person to speak with the man, and that he had told him the real and full truth of what had happened out there in those woods.

Ultimately THE SECRET CONFESSIONS Of RUSTIN PARR is an interesting but lackluster addition to the Blair Witch 'mythos.' Stern developed an even paced and intriguing plot, then gets it sidetracked with nostalgia until it simply peters out and fails to deliver anything worthwile. The book itself is short, and half of it comprises Dominick Cazale's journal. Although supposedly panic-stricken over the degeneration of his wife, Cazale, however, prefers rather to reminisce about his mother and two brothers and their old Baltimore neighborhood. When he writes about Burkittsville, he spends too much time on the diffulties he, as a "city boy," had to overcome living out in the country. He also dwells far too long over the mutual infatuation between him and Kyle Brody's mother, Carol. That which we are waiting for: Parr's confession, isn't brought up until the near end, where it is surrounded by melodrama and vague enough to be considered simply an intimation.

What Stern wrote here could become the basis for a very good story about a young priest's early ministry. But it certainly isn't good horror.

Two words: cree-pee!
Short, sweet, and very chilling, this novel expands nicely upon the Blair Witch backstory presented in the movie, but does so in a way that shouldn't require readers to have actually seen the film. (At least, that's my guess; it's hard to be sure, since I have seen the film.) Author DA Stern demonstrates more than a mere understanding of the Blair Witch fictional mythos with this story; he clearly understands that what made the original movie so creepily effective was its "less is more" approach to horror. This novel uses the same philosophy; what it tells us about former priest Dominic Cazale and accused serial murderer of children Rustin Parr isn't half as scary as what it doesn't tell us. Like the previous Blair Witch spin-offs, the comics collected in the Blair Witch Chronicles book, fans of the movie should find more of what they enjoyed in this novel. Between this book and the comics, I'm pleased enough that I want to give the Blair Witch Files books a try!