Joey Madia, New Mystics Reviews

  (Iridescent Publishing, 2013), ISBN: 978-3-9524015-2-1 By Joey Madia What is the nature of reality? What is the value in Metaphor? Is there a single Truth to human existence or are our truths as unique as the number of people who populate the planet, or stars in the sky? William Azuski’s engaging array of characters tackle all of these questions and more in the metaphysical thriller Travels in Elysium . Akin to Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose and John Fowles’ The Magus , Travels is rich in geography and symbolism and invites frequent pauses (facilitated by its short chapters) for contemplation. At 539 pages of small, densely packed type, the book is as physically daunting as those of Eco and Fowles and just as metaphorically rich in material. The descriptions of the Greek island and its people and culture are needfully concrete—they anchor the reader in a solid landscape from which the story and characters launch into spiritual, metaphysical, and ate...

\ Every now and again I am sent a book for review that breaks down the partitions that I have constructed to separate the various aspects of my professional life. David Karmi’s Survivor’s Game is one of those books. I am going to review this book specifically from the point of view of my role as an artistic director and as resident playwright for two theatre companies that specialize in social justice and story-based education for young audiences and as a writing teacher and the author of the novel Jester-Knight . Survivor’s Game is specifically named to evoke popular adventure books for young readers like Hunger Games . From there one instantly thinks of the Harry Potter series, Chronicles of Narnia , and other best-selling series where young people come of age through life-threatening circumstances. These much-needed stories at the core of modern culture serve as essential rites of passage. The very popular George R.R. Martin series A Song of Fire and Ice (whic...

(2013, Bookstand Publishing, ISBN: 978-1-61863-517-4; http://www.bookstandpublishing.com/book_details/Memoirs_of_a_Modernday_Drifter) By Joey Madia [Disclaimer: Ronald Brown has studied creative writing with me for 3 years. I served as editor on this book from concept to final draft] What it means to be a man has continually evolved in the past 70 or so years. In many ways, the Marlboro man image has lost its power—men who are too aggressive, too take-charge, too, well, manly, have come to be seen as an artifact of a less enlightened time. Robert Bly’s Iron John and the Fire in the Belly movement rose in the late eighties and early nineties as the old models of manhood began to crumble and the male of our species began to come untethered from many of the guiding principles that served my father’s and his father’s generations. Don’t get me wrong—there’s a fine line between being a strong man and being an overly controlling, argumentative, and just plain violent...

 (Revised Edition; Millhouse Press, 2013), ISBN: 978-0-615-43925 As ubiquitous as computers have become, and with the promise of Virtual Reality for everyone always just upon the horizon, books like this one are bound to become ubiquitous as well. Aimed at teens, this first book in the Quests of Shadowind series follows a brother and sister team and their friends and enemies through a journey in a computer-generated world in which they one day wake up. Reminiscent of films like Tron , Lawnmower Man , and The Matrix trilogy in its exploration of alternate realms of existence generated by computer and inhabited by brave and daring humans who have nothing left to explore but the wireless world of cyberspace, Sky Shifter never really takes off and pays back the IOUs of its clever premise. Despite its Revised Edition status the novel feels like a tight plot begging for better-drawn characters and less stiff dialogue, like a brand-new house filled with old ...

 (New Milford, CT: Visionary Living, 2013), ISBN: 978-0-9857243-3-7 Exactly two years ago I reviewed The Vengeful Djinn: Unveiling the Hidden Agenda of Genies , a book co-authored by Guiley. This new companion book, subtitled “The Hidden Links between Djinn, Shadow People, ETs, Nephilim, Archons, Reptilians, and other Entities,” picks up where The Vengeful Djinn left off—with the possibility that the Djinn (often known by their Westernized name, genies ) are more active than many researchers have believed, and, indeed, may often be mistaken for the types of entities listed in the subtitle.             Djinn, which appear throughout the Quran, are composed of “smokeless fire” and reside in a parallel dimension to ours. It is said that they are highly intelligent, ancient (they helped to build Solomon’s temple), and eager to take the Earth back from the human race, which has usurped it. I refer readers inte...

 by Tash Jones (available for Amazon Kindle March 25, 2013; www.tashjones.co.uk ) This debut novel from Masters student Tash Jones is a compelling mirror-glance journey into the effects of the Gothic novel on Victorian sensibilities. While both referencing outright and adapting subtle elements of Walpole’s Castle of Otranto , Stoker’s Dracula , Shelley’s Frankenstein , Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde , and Austen’s Northanger Abbey , The Luminous Memories of Alexander Vile concerns itself with pulling back the layers of appearance and looking at the arts and their relationship to the dark side of Victorian-era values (the novel’s events take place in 1892–93). Uses the standard Gothic conventions of diaries, letters, and narration, Vile is a mystery that is slowly pieced together, reading at times like the surrealism of Poe, with generous doses of the flowery, image-laden and complexly sytaxed prose of the time in which it takes place. It is a story of people...

(New York: theenk Books, 2013, ISBN: 978-0-9647342-8-9) Going to the mailbox and finding the latest book by Eileen Tabios is always a treat for me. Of all the poets and writers of poetry I have been blessed enough to know over the past two decades, none provokes thought and inspiration more than she. Eileen is a pioneer, inventing new forms such as the hay(na)ku, and always adding in some essays or other notes into her collections. In the end, I always feel like I have gotten just that little bit more from her and her work than “just” poems. In The Awakening , we get a little bit of lots of things, so if you’ve yet to read Eileen’s work, this is an excellent place to start. In less than 60 pages, she gives us a long poem on the sexual (mis)adventures of some of history’s best-known painters, as framed through the medical work of the poet and MD William Carlos Williams. We then move on to an offering of emails sent and received on September 11, 2001, that ...

 (Rutland Square Press, Boston, MA, 2013; ISBN: 9780985894603) by Joey Madia Mari Passananti’s The K Street Affair is a well-paced and everything-but-the-kitchen-sink action-adventure featuring a first-person perspective from lawyer-turned-amateur-agent Lena Mancuso. Use of the first person is unusual in the spy/terrorism genre, and it took a little while for me to adjust to it, but it does not deter from the overall success of the novel and in the end, provides some benefits to the way the tale unfolds. The story begins with a terrorist bombing in Washington, DC and quickly escalates and broadens to involve a high-powered law firm, a multi-national corporation, several front organizations, and high-level politicians in Saudi Arabia, Russia, and the United States, all vying for economic and global power. Add in the FBI and a sudden murder of someone very close to Lena and we are taken along on a fast-paced ride through the geo-political world of offshore accou...