Delving into the labyrinthine quagmire known as the paranormal, Staretz Encounter is the story about news reporter, Rudy Styne, from New York City, and his Eurasian counterpart, Dr. Imo Bern, a neuroscientist from a secret parapsychology laboratory in Siberia. The Soviet Union has collapsed, Eurasia is in turmoil. A right-wing extremist, Petar Bonzovalivitch, has come to the fore. Marshalling a cadre of psionic soldiers whose brains have been rewired, Bonzovalivitch launches a clandestine operation to topple the West and restore the empire that was once Russia. His head of psi-ops is black magician Dr. Georgi Boshtov, ex-KGB agent and grand-nephew of Gregori Rasputin. Their target for capture is Egyptian superpsychic Abdullah Manu. A controversial celebrity, Manu's psychic feats have splintered the scientific community. From the point of the view of the media, Manu is passed off as a charlatan, and the parapsychologists who study him, like NYU physics professor Jay Ketchembach, are billed as pseudoscientists.
Rudy Styne, reporter for Modern Times, wakes up one morning to a foreboding dream which comes true later in the day. Having never had a psychic experience before, the reporter decides to research the topic for an article for the magazine. At the same time, he also begins to uncover Petar Bonzovalivitch's nefarious plan and also interview Professor Ketchembach and Abdullah Manu. Eventually, Rudy and his girlfriend, Chessie Barnsworth, meet up with heartsick scientist, Imo Bern, at an international conference on psychotronics. Bern, who was performing the brain operations necessary for the creation of the legion of human cyborgs, tries to defect and pass his knowledge to the West as Rudy attempts to persuade an all too skeptical news community that Bonzovalivitch is more than an outrageous buffoon.
As the story progresses, Rudy visits psychic researchers and an avatar in search for ultimate truths, only to return to New York to find his local guru, Professor Ketchembach, murdered. Georgi Boshtov and his cybernetic goon squad are on the loose. They kidnap Chessie and also capture Rudy and Abdullah Manu. The climax pits superpsychic Abdullah Manu against the evil occultist Georgi Boshtov in an allogorical battle which recapitulates the eternal struggle between light and dark forces for control of the planet.
In the genre of the Stephen King novels and such movies, television shows and books as The 6th Sense, Martrix, The Green Mile, Powder, The Fury, Lawnmower Man, X-Files, X-Men, The Exorcist and Celestine Prophecy, STARETZ ENCOUNTER is a New Age trek through a paradigm-shifting world where telepathy and telekinesis are more than arcane possibilities.
