What do you get when you mix clairvoyance and psychokinesis with Cold War secret agents, the Chicago mob, shady con artists, and a dysfunctional family undergoing a crisis of zany proportions? You get Spoonbenders, a wildly original, humorous, and unexpectedly heartwarming tale of paranormal drama. This book had everything in it—and I do mean EVERYTHING—but I’ve seen Daryl Gregory pull off some pretty amazing things with an even stranger mishmash of ideas, so I never doubted for a second that he would be able to pull this off. Spoonbenders introduces us to the Telemachus family, whose members made brief waves in the 70s by dazzling late-night talk show audiences with their amazing psychic abilities. At the head of this act is Teddy Telemachus, who ironically is the only one with no real power of his own, though he does make up for it by being a smooth and charismatic master swindler. The true talent was his wife Maureen, who is said to be the most powerful psychic in the world. And in their individual ways, each of their children inherited a bit of their mother’s gifts: Irene is a human lie detector, able to fox out the smallest insincerities or…
