The Choice
By Marilyn Meredith 

     What's the matter with kids today? Satanist heavy-metal music---and here we thought Britney Spears, P. Diddy and Snoop Dogg were the problem.

     Widowed Deputy Jessica McGuire chooses a small town as a new start for herself and her son. The problem is, in storytelling, whenever someone chooses a small town to get away from the city, the small town proves to have its own challenges. In this case, Deputy McGuire deals with a teenage son going through a phase of listening to heavy metal and drawing portraits of skulls with rats crawling from their eyes, when she's not trying to convince the Dukes of Hazzard male law enforcement colleagues that a missing goat, a cow drained of its blood, a stolen redwood cross, and a desecrated infant grave with a missing baby skeleton add up to "Something wicked this way comes."

    Luckily, handsome Pastor David Tanner, also widowed, comes along to awaken Jessica's heart and aid her in her investigation as they uncover a Satanic cult in the sleepy town of Lawrenceville. A local college professor with a Miltonian/Branch Davidian complex leads the cult. " You'd think that people would have learned, since killing animals is how Son of Sam started. Deputy McGuire isn't a regular churchgoer or Bible reader, but she has a powerful sense of right and wrong to challenge the wicked goings-on.

    This classic tale of good and evil takes on the good old boys' small town network, single motherhood, the eternal struggle to raise children with good values, and our tendency to become immune to damaging messages (if anyone doesn't think popular culture has degenerated, watch the new show "Banzai" on the Fox network.)

     Tipper Gore and the PRC made looking for satanic lyrics a joke, and one could argue that the violent, sexually explicit, misogynistic lyrics of rap and hip-hop songs are more toxic. However, Pastor David Tanner makes an eloquent point that without challenging the dangerous messages (such as those of our instant-gratification culture), you unconsciously accept them and make them part of your soul. But a determined single mom with a shotgun works wonders.