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A Review of Munchausen by Proxy for Fun and Profit, by Ken and Solomon Goudsward

  (Prince George, BC, Canada: Dimensionfold Publishing, 2021). ISBN: 9781989940020 We live in an increasingly humorless world, where language is increasingly regulated (and manipulated) and, should you say what is deemed by a certain sector to be the wrong thing , you might just be “canceled” by the swiping, judgmental (read righteous) left thumb of the judgers on social media. In such a sensitive, unsophisticated world, novels such as Munchausen by Proxy for Fun and Profit —written by a father and son—are essential reading. They take on serious subjects (in this case, the illegal sale of prescription drugs) and invite us to see them in a different, nuanced way—through the motivations of the often simple-minded everyday people who deem these courses of action as their only means to participating in Rabid Capitalism. A Cash-Grab Extravaganza from which they imagine everyone else on the planet but them is benefiting. In “real life,” if these dreaming schemers’ stories are interest
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“The Role of a Lifetime”: A Review of El Flamingo, by Nick Davies

    (New York: YBK Publishers, 2023). ISBN: 978-1-936411-84-9 While I cannot say it’s the same for everyone, I have found, in five and a half decades on Earth, that my most profound and valuable experiences in life are rarely about what I thought they’d be about. Perhaps that is why the maxim the journey is its own reward is so powerful for me. Lest I get to feeling too lonely in this philosophy, Nick Davies’s El Flamingo —in addition to being one of the strongest, most perfectly plotted novels I have read in several years—feels like a case in point. Lou Galloway, a frustrated actor whose Hollywood career isn’t very Hollywood and not much of a career, decides to leave it all behind and go to Mexico to lose himself and get past his most recent almost-but-not-quite Big Break in copious amounts of tequila, sea, and sand. After arriving in “Playa del something-or-other,” he is promptly pulled into an international intrigue that takes him to Columbia, where all of his considerable ac
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“Heartbreak and Hope”: A Review of Where Yellow Flowers Bloom, by Kim Cantin

  (Los Angeles: Precocity Press, 2023). ISBN: 979-8-9873501-6-4. Over the past two decades, I have reviewed eight books written by female authors sharing their process of grief and their inspiring journey to hope. In most of these stories, their loss is that of a teenage child. As a father of three adult children, I cannot begin to fathom the depth of pain that comes with losing a child. As fate would have it, I spent the day before I began this review with two mothers who lost their teenage children—one to drowning and one to murder. In the latter case, her daughter—a star in the classroom and on the soccer field—became addicted to opioids after back surgery when she was sixteen, beginning a descent into illegal drug use in a world of ruthless people who, several years later, lured, tortured, and killed her before leaving her body by the side of the road. Their journeys are profound and vastly different. The former was lost in a haze of prescription medications until she met the secon
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“An Essential Guide for UFOlogists”: A Review of Before Roswell: The Secret History of UFOs, by Ken Goudsward and Barbara M. DeLong

   (Dimensionfold Publishing, 2023). ISBN: 978-1-989940-58-7. At 108 pages, this slim but indispensable guide documents UFO sightings from Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947, working backward by century and then historical epoch to 270,000 BCE (yes, you read that right). The authors present considerable proof that UFO sightings and encounters with interdimensional beings are not just tricks of the eye, Jupiter, Venus, swamp gas, weather inversions, crash test dummies, and all of the other bunk that the USAF and the rest of the military-industrial-intelligence complex (MIIC) historically spent incalculable time and money to make everyone believe. That is, until a few years ago, when the MIIC decided it was a much stronger strategy to hawk their insidious brand of false disclosure to build up—on the heels of creating the U.S. Space Force—the idea of an alien threat (and the defense budget)—which Nazi loyalist Werner von Braun warned us not to trust. Their shills in and out of the Beltway—i
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“Stargate Meets the Mummy”: A Review of Ancient Civilizations (Book 1 of Lamentations and Magic), by Russell Cowdrey

 “Stargate Meets the Mummy”: A Review of Ancient Civilizations (Book 1 of Lamentations and Magic), by Russell Cowdrey (Coppell, TX, USA: RPC Novels, LLC, 2023). ISBN: 978-1-960300-00-3. While standing solidly on its merits as historical fiction, Ancient Civilizations ’ supernatural aspects are what set this book apart. From the opening battle, set in Egypt in 321 BC, the author cues the reader that there is something greater than reality as we know it going on. By the end of the opening, Cowdrey has given us an intriguing JJ Abrams-esque Mystery Box. The narrative quickly shifts to the Louvre. It’s 1883. Educated antiquities expert Louisa Sophia is robbing the exhibit of Ramses III. Louisa is Evelyn Carnahan from The Mummy with very sketchy morals. We again change locations to Mosul Province in the Ottoman Empire to meet the hero—physician turned archaeologist and treasure hunter Ben McGehee. Like Quincy Morris from Dracula , he’s from Texas. From Louisa and Ben’s first meeting,
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“A Psychic Tapestry”: A Review of Somewhere the Dead Are Singing by Karl Petry

  (New Milford, CT: Visionary Living Publishing, 2021). ISBN: 978-1-942157-54-0 Having just read and reviewed Karl Petry’s first book, Absent Witness , and learning that he is very much the “real deal,” I immediately noticed the title of his second book— Somewhere the Dead Are Singing— and felt instantly compelled to read it. It was during the Mothman Festival in 2019, after cohosting a memorial event for Rosemary Ellen Guiley after her passing several months earlier, that I first experienced the accuracy of Petry’s title. While walking near the igloos in the fabled Point Pleasant TNT Area with a dozen colleagues—many of whom had been close with Rosemary—my PSB11 spirit box (Ro’s personal choice) spontaneously switched on. I placed my voice-activated digital recorder over the speaker as a communication began to emerge. Back in the hotel a few hours later, I played the tape and distinctly heard a mix of ethereal and a single human voice singing: “We’re here with you.” The four not
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“A Firsthand Account of Secret Societies”: A Review of 334‰ Lies: The Revelation of H. M. v. Stuhl.

   Translated by Samuel Chong (English trans. June 2021; originally published in German in 2000). ISBN: 9798513274353 In an age of Conspiracy Theory Mania—a mix of those who revel in it and those who completely reject it—there are few subjects that are as thorny and contentious as the idea that there are secret lodges or societies that set the course of geopolitics from the shadows, engineering puppet governments, wars, and catastrophes to subjugate humanity and main ultimate control. From the innocuous fraternal organizations like the Freemasons, to political and economic organizations like the Bilderberg Group, Trilateral Commission, Council on Foreign Relations, and Club of Rome, the idea that a select few are making decisions for billions is one that is often met with anger and fierce recrimination. No matter the “evidence” put forth about odd places like Bohemian Grove and secret satchels with documents outlining the course of wars originating with the Bavarian Illuminati; no
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