
A month ago, Margaret Haart’s husband left her for a college girl. A week ago, her father died in a car crash near his coastal Maine home. She has come to retrieve his dog and belongings, and stepped into a war for this strange little town’s soul.
Revenge is a destroying fire.
In the morning light Margaret is drawn to a looming structure nearby: a decrepit mansion, where she finds Esther Brandt living alone, terrorized by local children and thinking she hears dead family members walking the halls at night. Esther is the last surviving member of her once-great family. She doesn’t use electric lights, telephone or television because she believes herself to be an EMF hypersensitive, one who suffers pain in the presence of electromagnetic fields. And, she tells Margaret, she is under nightly attack by searing radiation of an unknown source.
Horrified by the old woman’s mental state and plight, Margaret turns to the townspeople, only to find they have been ground to dust by Esther’s long-dead father and his long-closed mill. The only person stepping up to help is Ruth, a brassy school teacher and the only local who came to Margaret’s father’s wake. Esther may be crazed, Ruth tells Margaret, but she is not crazy.
Atop the hill behind the Brandt estate, a 21st century robber-baron has begun night flights from a reactivated World War II airfield. High Ground Technologies is rushing to perfect an airborne laser weapon, launching test flights almost directly over the Brandt mansion on their way out to the skies above the North Atlantic.

Hi, Rick.
I know you’ve been interested in the impact of EMF invading our environment, and was wondering if you’ve run across any studies of the effects of all the radars emanating from our vehicles today. For example, my car (a 2018 Nissan Murano) has three radar units; one in front, and one each on left and right sides. Since those are aimed away from me (I assume), they don’t concern me as much as radars on other vehicles aimed at me. Do you know of any investigations into this?
Having said all of that, I confess I have gotten to rely heavily on them, and feel the safety provided (particularly for older drivers like me) may outweigh any disadvantage.
Just curious.
Otherwise, hope all is going well.
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T. I have not, though I have thought about it as a general further escalation of the electronic smog around us. The greatest buzz and concern is around 5G or the fifth generation of cell phone radio transceivers. While they are generally low power, in concept they will, when fully deployed, be freaking everywhere—and MUCH closer to us than cell phone towers which have a radius of around 3-4 miles or so. These require that they be mounted on virtually every corner light pole in the country. They are rolling forward unabated because their prime value is not cell phones, but autonomous vehicles and other emerging connected technology. In Australia and Europe, this is a hot topic. I’ve spoken to local political leaders here and they don’t really know what I’m talking about. This freight train has left the station.
From your tech background, I’m sure it’s occurred to you that, not only are those radars pointed away from you, but you are riding around in a Faraday cage when you are in a steel automobile. Pedestrians and people who spend time on busy streets will increasingly be painted by this radiation in a surging bath of EMR as vehicles equipped with this new tech become more common.
Remember the scene in Animal House when John Belushi’s character “Bluto” is whipping up the brothers to fight back against the Dean’s ban on their fraternity. “Give up?!!” he souted. “Did we give up when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?!!”
“Germans?” one brother asks incredulously.
“Forget it,” Tim Matheson’s character answers. “He’s on a roll.’
5G is Bluto Blutarsky for the new century.
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Update for T: After being sensitized to this by you I have kept my eyes scanning the posts for this but still see little to nothing about health risks related to this new tech. Do you know if it is active radar type monitoring performed or could it be more like passive IR, which emits no new radiation, just reads the heat signature of the target. Inquiring minds…
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