Ice Station Nautilus by Rick CampbellMy rating: 0 of 5 stars
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Thursday, June 9, 2016
Wednesday, June 8, 2016
Review: What Vengeance Comes
What Vengeance Comes by Anthony M. StrongMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Review: WHAT VENGEANCE COMES by Anthony M. Strong
I loved this book! It's tremendously exciting horror and I kept a pleased expression of satisfaction throughout. Mr. Strong has a smooth writing style, and leads the reader subtly to the horrors. Not for him is the "throw the gore at the wall and watch it splatter" approach. Instead, while we are quite frightened (indoors, in daytime, I still kept glancing over my shoulder and watching behind me), we readers are also treated to excellent writing talent and an enjoyable story. I knew when I read THE APARTMENT that this is an author to watch.
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Tuesday, June 7, 2016
Review: Anomaly Flats
Anomaly Flats by Clayton SmithMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
REVIEW: ANOMALY FLATS by Clayton Smith
How do I love ANOMALY FLATS? Just let me count the ways. First, the title. For a reader who is fascinated with science, science fiction, horror, and the English language, the title alone is sufficient to excite my admiration and quicken my heartbeat. Twilight Zone, Missouri: here we come!!
Second, the blurb: One of my favorite books of recent years [a novel which always reminds me of an Outer Limits version of Los Alamos and the Manhattan Project: "what if?"] Is Robert Jackson Bennett's AMERICAN ELSEWHERE: a small Southwestern community which is--different, in oh so many ways.
So too is little Anomaly Flats, Missouri. Tucked away beyond primevally immense forests, Anomaly Flats Is a most special locale. Its ongoing charm is hypnotic. So magnetic--I hope to be moving there shortly. [Smile]
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Monday, June 6, 2016
Spotlight: THE KNOW: PRESERVATION by Ed Kurst
Welcome to another exciting tour with Novel Publicity. This time with Author Ed Kurst and his first novel, The Know Preservation! As usual, we've got great bloggers joining us with reviews, guest posts and interviews as well as unique prizes like a Kindle Paperwhite, and pen set!
As part of our launch week celebrations, The Know: Preservation is on sale for only 99¢! Get it before the end of the week!
Guest Post with Author Ed Kurst
Maddie Alkira Reminisces About The Passing of the Journey Stone
Sometimes very old memories are actually just recollections of remembrances. They are a group of fuzzy images and half heard sounds, or they can sometimes not even be real events. But this day, I still remember moment by moment as if I am still there. It was 1915. I wasn’t obsessed with saving all humankind. I was only five years old. My parents were taking me on a trip: a long dirt road, hours of travel, the heat of the day beating down. I alternately sat and slept on top of the newly shorn sheep wool that was sheltered under the canopied cart. Alice, our lone mare, pulled it. This was the first time my parents had allowed me to accompany them to the city and marketplace. What excitement I had felt going to the city, the anticipation of the many stalls, and my parents trading our wool with strange people for flour and sugar. It was also where Maw Maw lived, of whom my mother always spoke. After five hours of jerky, bumpy travel in the cart, we finally reached the city of Darwin. In those days, only about a thousand people lived in the city, mostly foreigners. The Aboriginal community where I was from numbered many, many thousands, but they lived in small settlements in the surrounding area. When we arrived, my parents left me with Maw Maw while they went to do their trading. Maybe it was just because I was only five years old, but I remember my great-grandmother as being very tall. She had very dark blue eyes, much like my own. I thought Maw Maw was the oldest person in the whole world. And, in fact, that actually may have been the case at the time. She would have been one hundred years old that year. She lived in a simple one room house with a white clapboard front and a flat tar-paper roof. There was a large garden in the back filled with flowers, herbs, and vegetables. Combined with my parents’ sheep jerky and trade goods, it provided most of Maw Maw’s food for the year. But it wasn’t how she looked or the excitement of being in the city or the prospect of freshly baked sweet biscuits that makes me remember that day. It was the odd question that she asked me. When we were seated across a rickety old kitchen table, she asked, “Child, do you Know why you are here today?” “Of course,” I had replied with some pride. “I turned five years old two weeks ago. Mother and father said I was old enough to see the city market…and to visit you. That’s why I am here today, to see you Maw Maw!” My great-grandmother had stared so intensely at me, and it had seemed her deep blue eyes had glowed from within. “Child, do you Know why you are here today?” I had looked away, troubled, and had thought harder. In the last year I had started Knowing things: when the neighbor’s dog would be hit by a car and when lightning would strike our barn. After the first Know, I had understood, heeded the second, and shooed Alice out just in time. I hadn’t been sure if Maw Maw was asking me about those things. I hadn’t intended to tell her. I had thought those were my secrets. Then I had looked deep into her eyes, and something had changed. I had felt weightless. The light streaming in through the kitchen window had seemed to grow dim, as if I was falling into an unending well of darkness. Frightened, I had closed my eyes and cried out. It was like my mind was a part of hers. I also was connected to something else—something dark and frightening—but enriching and amazing at the same time. In my mind’s eye, I had had a vision, a Know. Starting with me, a seeming unending line of people had streamed into the distance, into the ancient past. And in front of me, a long lifetime, but one that ended in fire, destroying everyone and everything. And then there was nothing. When I opened my eyes, Maw Maw’s wrinkled face was looking down at me, happy and smiling, which was odd given what I...we, had just seen together. I was on the floor, and she had helped me to a sitting position. She had seemed so full of energy and purpose. “Maddie, you brighten Maw Maw’s day like no other in her entire life. Can you keep a secret?” A five year old can pledge almost anything—and yet it really had no binding effect—but this was different. It had a deep, gut-tumbling meaning to me, and it was my Maw Maw asking. “Yes Maw Maw, I promise.” And then my great-grandmother had told me the legends of the Great Migration of our people and the Dream Time and the Know. She had spoken of old Tril with awe and then more affectionately of someone called Tirnal. My Maw Maw had said that whenever I Knew something, I must always believe it; never cast it away as a day dream or casual thought. That had been the beginning of my training. I spent every summer for seven years with her. At the end of the seventh summer, on her deathbed, my Maw Maw had asked the question one more time. “Do you Know why you are here my child?” I had replied solemnly, “Yes, to preserve the Know and begin the evolution.” She had handed me the talisman of our Clan, the journey stone, and then joined our ancestors.About the Book
John Preston set aside the easy bullet that would end his certain lingering death. He now Knew too much. His mind had just returned from a wild ride tens of thousands of years into the past where he witnessed three primitive humans divining a path to save humankind from a global fiery catastrophe. What John now Knew might cure him but could also require he shred the very fabric of time and space.
John’s quest for answers will thrust him into the lead role to confront the Consortium, a cabal of eight families with the power to Know the future and the past. Guided by John’s latent Know ability and a 70,000 year old prophecy, he sets out on a path for his own salvation. Success will mean life, failure…a cruel doom for all humankind.
Preservation is the first book in the Know Trilogy which wraps a new theory of space-time, humankind’s evolution, millennia old conspiracies, and imminent global destruction around a broken man’s redemption, an evil man’s reckoning and a driven woman’s unique destiny.
About the Author
Ed Kurst’s life as a child was a nostalgic bit of Americana, with two married parents, one sibling, and a pet beagle. They didn’t even lock their cars. The only thing missing was the proverbial white picket fence, but their neighbor did build a split rail one from seasoned logs.
As a kid, Ed frequented a neighborhood library, accessed by a spiral staircase to the second floor of an old brick building. It was a wondrous place to a curious child. Hardback novels were stacked from floor to ceiling and nestled in every nook and cranny of the library’s dusty shelves. Tolkien, Lovecraft, and Asimov were his first and favorite fantasy and science fiction authors. In between reading these classics, he devoured every book about dinosaurs and astrophysics his young mind could comprehend.
These early literary influences eventually led him to study a pre-med, engineering curriculum with a special focus on the psychology and physiology of the human brain. Eager to get out in the real world, and not spend six more years in school, he decided to pursue the engineering side of his interests. He didn’t completely abandon his calling for medicine. But getting an EMT qualification and occasionally riding an ambulance at night seemed to satisfy that urge.
Ed Kurst’s engineering vocation led him to live and work in five European countries and several places in the United States. During the last decade of a varied career, he settled in the US Gulf Coast and specialized in leading diverse technical teams to implement new technology and develop mega engineering projects. Once retired, he turned his attention to other pursuits.
One fateful month, about eight years ago, he was reading all he could about the CERN particle accelerator, the migration of homo sapiens out of Africa, the demise of the Neanderthals, and epigenetics. He also was reacquainting himself with his favorite fantasy and science fiction authors. Voilà, The Know trilogy was born! The first book—The Know: Preservation—is due for publication in 2016. The second—The Know: Evolution—is in draft form and scheduled for 2017. The last in the series—The Know: Salvation—should follow in 2018. And, another novel—The Fae—is in progress as well. It’s packed full of strange and wonderful fantasy creatures that live and love and scheme right under our very noses!
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Sunday, June 5, 2016
Review: Parallels: Felix Was Here
Parallels: Felix Was Here by L.G. KeltnerMy rating: 0 of 5 stars
Review: PARALLELS: FELIX WAS HERE
An anthology of the Insecure Writers' Support Group, these ten stories explore parallel probabilities (and alternative history) in ways that are subtle, scary, unsettling, and quite unnerving, often Dystopian, and paranoia-instilling. Indeed, I am still experiencing subtle shivers and chills. I recommend reading this anthology one story at a time, letting each percolate.
I reviewed via StoryCartel.
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Wednesday, June 1, 2016
Review: Disappearance at Devil's Rock
Disappearance at Devil's Rock by Paul TremblayMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
REVIEW: DISAPPEARANCE AT DEVIL'S ROCK by Paul Tremblay
I have heard so much positive praise of the author's A HEAD FULL OF GHOSTS [2015] so I was eager to read his newest. Every expectation was fulfilled. DISAPPEARANCE AT DEVIL'S ROCK is an exceptional novel, unforgettable--and a strong Best of 2016.
Beginning with a knock-out reader's hook--the dreaded after-midnight phone call that is every parent's nightmare, the action and emotional impact is literally non-stop. Instead of immediate closure ("your child/spouse/parent is dead") in which the worst has already happened and the grief must begin, in this novel the grief, fear, anxiety, is open-ended: Elizabeth's son's best friend since first grade calls in the early AM, on the landline, to ask if Tommy' s come home. Three friends had been at a sleepover at one's home; but they had lost Tommy in the forest of the State Park wrapping around their Massachusetts community.
As the story unfolds, relationships are tested: Elizabeth's with daughter Kate, and Elizabeth's mother Janice with both Elizabeth and Kate. The friendship of the two remaining boys, Josh and Luis, is maximally stressed, and as reminiscences unfold, leading to a powerfully impacting denouement, readers--and characters--learn of the manipulated events of the summer that drive wedges among the boys and the horrifying consequence which inevitably resulted in a disappearance at Devil's Rock.
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Tuesday, May 31, 2016
Review: The Final Cut
The Final Cut by Jasper BarkMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Review: THE FINAL CUT by Jasper Bark
Disclaimer in advance: This review constitutes my honest and impartial opinion. Neither author nor publisher have influenced this review. I did purchase the book, in advance, and receive no remuneration for reviewing it.
Not for the faint of heart nor weak of stomach, THE FINAL CUT is total WOW from start to finish. I chose it initially because I've come to trust the publisher for high-quality excellence. I was spot on, again. This novel is incredible. I expected extreme horror: I found this, and I discovered cosmic philosophy, metaphysics, mythology and ancient religion. Above all I discovered Transcendence. Yes, indeed. Reading THE FINAL CUT became for me a mystical experience.
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Monday, May 30, 2016
Review: The Cabin
The Cabin by Natasha PrestonMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Review: THE CABIN
A remarkably exciting story, with a lot of intrigue--all the characters seem eventually to be hiding tons of secrets; each has so much needing to be hidden from exposure. I love locked-room mysteries (guess reading Agatha Christie and "Murders in the Rue Morgue" as a tiny child spoilt me) and THE CABIN certainly satisfies. All the impossibities, yet here's the inescapable facts. Wonderful!
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Sunday, May 29, 2016
Review: Resthaven
Resthaven by Erik ThermeMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Review: RESTHAVEN by Erik Therme
This book is full-on "WOW"!! I don't think I breathed the entire time, and the reading went FAST!!! Who knew that an abandoned convalescent care center could be as terrifying and as physically dangerous as an abandoned asylum or hospital or foundry? One far out group of teens discovers it can...but will they live to regret their intrusion? RESTHAVEN packs a double whammy for enterprising readers: not only full-on gasps and heart-jerks of horror, but tons of character evolution! I can't say that no animals were harmed in the making of this plot--but .can say this is one righteous read and I want to read it all over again.
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Review: The First Church
The First Church by Ron RipleyMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Review: THE FIRST CHURCH by Ron Ripley
[MOVING IN Book 4]
Author Ron Ripley deserves a wide audience and more acclaim, for truly his imagination never ceases. [Japanese soldier ghosts, in life practitioners of Shinto, housed in a New England Congregationalist Church!?! Strictly surreal!] This novella is fourth in the MOVING IN series, a series I hope never ends. Poor Brian Roy, the accidental ghost hunter, is called in on what turns out to be a seriously nasty, violent, and dangerous case (the "lucky" victims only suffer heart attacks--which is a real threat for Brian because of his cardiac history). These soldiers are mean!! Just because they've been deceased seventy years doesn't mean they're not both really, really sadistic, and terribly violent. So yes, a fair amount of blood and grisly and "not for the faint of heart" moments; but to be fair, some of the scenes, in other hands, would have been a whole lot more splatter-y. So I won't call this "extreme." However [rare event] the ending made me tearful (twice).
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Review: Tanners Dell
Tanners Dell by S.E. EnglandMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Review: TANNERS DELL by Sarah England
Ever wonder if Horror fiction can inspire nightmares: paralysing, terrible nightmares? [Hypnagogia: it's not just a term in psychology texts]. TANNERS DELL, the exceptional continuation to the exceptional FATHER OF LIES, is outstanding. I don't get horror this refined often enough. The plotting is a conspiracy theorist' s dream come true, and the villains have it all wrapped up: nothing and no one can get at them or unravel the situation. Amazingly, I had near-immediate, near-total recall of the first book--a rare occurrence, since I read so much and so widely that I often struggle to recall title, author, or plot.
My recommendation: read TANNERS DELL, read FATHER OF LIES, reread: sleep with all the lights on [until the lights go off by themselves]--and remember, you never know who is part of the conspiracy--never....
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