The Friday 56 (With Book Beginnings): My Best Friend's Exorcism by Grady Hendrix + 50/50 Friday

Welcome to The Friday 56, a weekly meme hosted by Freda's Voice.

These are the rules:

1. Grab a book, any book.

2. Turn to page 56, or 56% on your eReader.
3. Find any sentence (or a few, just don't spoil it) that grabs you.
4. Post it.
5. Add the URL to your post in the link on Freda's most recent Friday 56 post.

I'm also taking part in Book Beginnings, a weekly meme hosted by Rose City Reader.  The rules are pretty simple - you share the first sentence or so and your initial thoughts, impressions, or whatever else it inspires.  Don't forget to link up your post's url with Rose City Reader.

This week I'm spotlighting one of my current reads, My Best Friend's Exorcism by Grady Hendrix.  I loved his previous release Horrorstör - in fact it was one of my favorite reads of 2016.  I'm about a third of the way through this now and I'm really enjoying it so far.  It's set in the 80's and is something like a combination of the movies The Exorcist and Beaches, plus it has a decent sense of humor to boot.  Did I mention that it's designed to look like a high school year book, similar to the way that Horrorstör is made to look like a catalog?  There are even inscriptions and signatures from fellow classmates on the front and back endpapers!

Beginning:

The exorcist is dead.

56:

The water oozed around the floating dock, rocking it up and down.

"What if she hit her head?" Abby asked.

"Are there really alligators?" Glee asked.

Something moved in the marsh grass and Abby jerked.  Was it an alligator?  What did an alligator sound like?  Were alligators nocturnal?  She didn't know.  Why didn't school teach them anything useful?

This week I'm also taking part in a brand new linkup called 50/50 Friday, which is hosted by Carrie @ The Butterfly Reader and Laura @ Blue Eye Books.  Every week they'll have a new topic featuring two sides of the same coin - this week the topic is Character most/ least changed by their hero's journey.  I'm having a difficult time thinking of which character's have changed the most over the course of their journey, so I'm choosing a hero and an anti-hero instead that have both changed pretty dramatically by the end of their story.

Frodo Baggins from The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien - Goes from an average hobbit living in the Shire to the savior of Middle-Earth destroying The One Ring and defeating Sauron once and for all.

Lucifer from Paradise Lost by John Milton - Goes from God's favorite angel to, you know, Satan after falling from grace and leading an unsuccessful rebellion against God.