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Plot Twists Oliver Meech
Reviewed
by Ian Keable
Oliver
Meech has realised what most magicians instinctively know: there are far too
many tricks out there. So better to play around with existing effects and
methods and try and come up with some new plots. And in this book he certainly
delivers the goods.
The book is divided into four sections, Card Twists, Coin Twists, Mind Twists
and Other Twists. It is hard to generalise about the direction that Oliver takes
a particular trick – because he scatterguns in all directions, mostly to
productive effect. For instance in Card Twists, he combines a D’Lite with a
miniature card appearing inside a torch, a way of getting a spectator to
genuinely separate colours in an ‘Out of This World’ variation and combining a
folded prediction with a signed card to pocket.
In Coin Twists he has a means of getting a coin inside a closed Snapple bottle,
in Mind Twists there is an Invisible Deck routine that doesn’t use a pack of
cards and a book test that doesn’t use a book; and in Other Twists he has a neat
presentational idea for the Bounce/No Bounce balls. I could go on – but I hope
you get the idea of the range of his thinking.
Inevitably in a book of this sort there are going to be some tricks that don’t
appeal – using dog tags and love hearts instead of coins felt a little too
contrived to my way of thinking; and some of the tricks play fairly ‘small’. But
for others these might be right up their street; so I certainly wouldn’t
criticise their inclusion.
Oliver says that part of the aim of the book is to get your own creative juices
flowing; and he has started the process with the help of two magician friends,
Dale Hildebrandt and Gregory Wilson, who add their own ideas and suggestions to
his twists. An added bonus is that Oliver writes in an amusing style and has a
little game you can play of seeing how he links the name of the ‘spectator’ in
his trick description to its title.
Plot Twists is an A4 sized soft bound book of 86 pages, with a total of 23
tricks. It costs £12.49 and can be bought direct from
http://stores.lulu.com/olivermeech
© Ian Keable, August 2010