Consecution

THE BLURB:
"Eidolon", the first effect contained within these pages,
has been described as a thing of "surpassing beauty beauty
beauty." Eidolon takes the notion of a simple hallucination
of a playing card and brings it into a reality. This
reality, by the way, occurs in hands of a spectator with his
or her own deck of cards untouched by the performer. Eidolon
is one of five miracles of "slight of mind " that is
presented in Consecution.

Full Contents:

- Buildings and Bridges -
An Introduction

- Eidolon -
A Hallucination

- The Sticky Spirit -
Add a Number with a Sticky Note Pad

- An Anomalous Remembrance -
Teaching an audience to remember you

- Thoughts on Metal Bending -

- Fantasy Animal Divination -
A clean and impromptu divination of a thought (nothing
written down).

- ESProntary -
Through body language, the performer reveals a thought of
ESP symbol.

- A Sailing Thought -
An Oragami Boat serves as a transformation object and helps
a subject forget his fear.

What Folks Are Saying About Consecution:

"I would recommend these books (Mendacity and Consecution)
in a heart beat. Patrick is a real worker, he makes a living
at this. As a result he knows all the subtleties one says
and does and how very important each piece of verbiage is.
He understands that the wrong word can signal things we do
not want a spectator to even think about.

...Fantasy Animal Divination: This is right down my alley,
it is a basically a psychological force. A new one that we
have not seen before. I can't tell you much more without
giving away the method. Just that what applies to most
psychological forces also applies to this one. It will not
work all the time but when it does, it stuns. Oh, Patrick
gives lots of extras to increase your odds and way to cover
if you are wrong."

-Banachek

"Both booklets (Mendacity and Consecution) are recommended
without reserve to the discriminating performer."

-Paolo Cavalli (Author of Upsilon and Omicron)

"I've really been enjoying both Mendacity and Consecution
and I've been taking my time absorbing them. That's always a
good sign for me. Do you know what I mean? (Some issues of
MAGIC for example I fly through in minutes - others I savor
for the month. Good stuff is like that).

Patrick has a wonderful writing style that exceeds so much
of the self published "booklets" all of us have struggled
with for so many years in magic. We're very fortunate that
Patrick and Derren Brown, Max Maven and Barrie Richardson
and others have the ability to write well in addition to
sharing great material. (There are others who sadly fail in
this regard, despite their popularity).

There's much more and I highly recommend you explore
Patrick's thinking for yourself. "

- James Biss (Author of Messing With Minds)

MY COMMENTS:
As I wrote about his first book, Mendacity, Patrick knows
exactly what he's doing and it's a joy to explore his
routines. His material consists of solid, well-thought out
routines that have been crafted to fit Patrick's style.
This alone makes this material worth reading.

Consecution is a 70 page perfect bound book (about 9" by 6")
that contains five effects and two essays. Eidolon finds a
participant hallucinating a playing card that doesn't exist;
The Sticky Spirit is a spirit writing effect using Post-It
Notes; Fantasy Animal Divination is a clever anagram to get
a rather unusual animal; ESPhrontery concerns the performer
divining a participant's thought-of ESP symbol from a pack
of ESP cards; A Sailing Thought is a nifty psychological
exercise using an origami boat.

I did find some of the editing on Consecution problematic.
For instance, on page 43, sentences stop halfway on the line
and continue on the next. There are lines which have one
word on them and they belong in the middle of a sentence.
Paragraphs are alternately indented or blocked. However, it
is very readable and is only bothersome to those who notice
major editing errors. This, in no way, diminishes the work
or makes it unreadable.

I'll provide the same warning on this one as I did for his
first book. Though some of these plots sound like they make
have some ingenious new principles or handling, Patrick uses
a very straightforward, often familiar, solution that may
seem too simple or bold to you. And that's exactly what
mentalism should be.