FROM THE TEETH OF ANGELS by Jonathan Carroll

Finished Su 1/7/18

This is an over-sized paperback that I received with THE WOODEN SEA. I got turned on to Carroll when I read AFTER SILENCE.

The premise of this novel is that Death is a character that visits while you dream. He will answer any question, but if you don't understand the answer, you will be wounded and scarred.

The story is told by the three or four principle characters. The first section is a letter Jesse to Sophie about his trip to Sardinia with Caitlin  where he meets Miep and Ian McGann. Ian was the man who was dreaming of Death.

Arlen- A very popular movie star who quits it all to live in Vienna. She meets the love of her life who turns out to be another manifestation of Death.
    -She loved her dead mother, but receives her mother's diary several years after her death and learns that her mother didn't really love her at all. The woman felt that both her daughter and husband were merely a burden and kept her from her 'true' life.

Rose- Best friend of Arlen and becomes the star's 'secretary'. Rose falls in love and marries Arlen's manager.

From Publishers Weekly at Amazon-

"Long popular in Germany and other parts of Europe, Carroll is acquiring a larger audience here, but his latest effort, though as provocative and as cleverly written as his previous books ( Outside the Dog Museum ; After Silence ), does not quite come together. Understanding the nature and logistics of dying becomes a perilous enterprise in this quirky tale of four people's supernatural confrontation with the malevolent angel of death. Wyatt Leonard, formerly "Finky Linky," a famous children's TV star, is dying of leukemia when his best friend Sophie pleads with him to accompany her to Vienna and find out what's wrong with her brother Jesse. Both Jesse and Englishman Ian McGann, who met while vacationing in Sardinia, are suffering from weird dreams in which they meet with Death and ask various questions. When Jesse and McGann fail to comprehend Death's cryptic answers to these queries, they awaken with serious injuries and ailments. Also in Vienna is Arlen Ford, a former movie star who has fled Hollywood and is living as a spartan recluse. Arlen falls in love with an HIV-positive photographer named Leland Zivic and ultimately must share the odd predicament of Wyatt, Jesse and McGann. Carroll develops his plot largely through the spoken anecdotes and exchanged letters of principal characters and their loved ones. Each of these accounts draws the reader in further with incremental revelations and skillfully crafted, suspenseful narrative. Unfortunately, these individually intriguing parts never cohere to form a greater whole. Despite the Faustian pretensions, obvious metaphysical questions are never probed and only murkily formulated, making the invocation of Death less meaningful than Carroll probably intended."

The book gets pretty metaphysical and maybe even 'out of control', but I thought that the ideas and issues were very thought provoking.