Today’s special guest at Reading Reality is Donna Del Oro, the author of The Delphi Bloodline, a compelling (see review here) mix of romantic suspense and edge-of-your-seat thriller with just a touch of the paranormal.
Donna is here to tell us a bit about the ways she worked some of the current theories about psychic awareness into her fictional characters in The Delphi Bloodline.
Donna Del Oro: Behind THE DELPHI BLOODLINE; Questions about ESP
Sixty percent of Americans, according to parapsychology studies cited in the book, Psychic Awareness, claim to have had experiences they would call psychic. Those experiences might be: Hunches about your or someone else’s future; physical clues that alert you to danger or wrong decisions; intuitive feelings that guide you correctly through life; and/or receiving information through physical sensations, thoughts, visions or emotions. It could be a prickly sensation at the back of your neck about a particular person, place or thing. Or a warm feeling at the thought of a good decision. If you’ve experienced any of the above, then you’re in touch with your psychic abilities.
My heroine, Athena Butler in THE DELPHI BLOODLINE, has already moved beyond the “I know but I don’t know how I know” psychic awareness, where most of us are at. Through her gifted mother’s instruction and guidance, Athena—the modern-day descendant of an ancient, psychically powerful bloodline of women—knows HOW and WHY she knows. She’s a talented clairvoyant who sees visions and is able to access information simply by touching a person. This clairvoyance might take the form of reading that person’s thoughts or by seeing into that person’s past.
While this ability of hers has caused her to lose boyfriends—who resent her intrusion into their privacy—her clairvoyance also alerts her to danger. When a handsome stranger approaches her in a Reno hotel gallery, where she is painting dead celebrities like Elvis and Frank Sinatra, Athena shakes his hand. Immediately, visions of his dark, violent past assail her, warning her that he is an impostor and even worse, that he means her harm.
Thus begins a threat that forces Athena to flee for her life. With the help of Kas Skoros, a tall, dark-haired man who claims to be a Guardian of the Delphi bloodline, they begin a journey of running, hiding and finally fighting back. As more psychics all over the country continue to disappear, the FBI is stymied. What’s happening to these psychics? Why are they disappearing? Who’s kidnapping them? Athena’s mother believes the mastermind has something to do with a White House dinner she attended months before.
The three remaining descendants of the bloodline—Athena, her mother and Kas’s mother—are the only ones who can uncover the truth behind these kidnappings.
So what’s the origin of such psychic abilities? Are these talents truly genetic, do they run in families, as I suggest in my novel? Do they originate from an all-seeing God, as Athena’s mother believes? Do they come from an omniscient spirit world? Another dimension of energy as yet unexplored by man, as Athena believes? Or are they simply physical, biochemical reactions in the brain, as some neuroscientists suggest? Do brain waves play a role, as some parapsychologists have studied?
Sorry to disappoint you, but experts have no definitive answers to those questions. Theories abound and what I put forth in THE DELPHI BLOODLINE is just one theory. There are many theories about psychic abilities, but no scientific proof.
Not yet, anyway.
What the scientific experiments (and I include some of these experiments in my novel) do prove is that these abilities exist in varying degrees among all of us. These are human abilities, like innate skills in art and music. Some of us can strum a few chords on a ukelele; others among us can write symphonies, like Beethoven and Gershwin. Some of us can paint by numbers; others become Titian, Michaelangelo and Da Vinci.
The true psychics among us—not the charlatans—exercise and develop their skills quietly and without fanfare or greed. For they know their gifts come with cautionary tales.
Like the cautionary tale in THE DELPHI BLOODLINE.
