Joey Madia, New Mystics Reviews

 (Kindle, 2020). ASIN: B08QBHC98R. On September 12, 2001, I threw about two and a half feet of Tom Clancy books into a dumpster because, when fiction started to feel like fact, there was no point in reading that kind of fiction anymore. A decade later, average citizens in America and the world are suffering from a social media society that cannot tell the difference between fact and fiction (a condition that the Corporate Oligarchy Military–Industrial–Intelligence Complex, or COMIIC, has not only created but of which it has made sinister use). The COMIIC’s agenda and messaging affect responses to and beliefs about climate change, supposedly democratic elections (have they ever been?), COVID-19, and the Federal Reserve/Stock Market/cryptocurrency. These practices have created a condition where 1 percent (probably far less after the past two years of pandemic-era money grabbing) of the U.S. population controls 99 percent of the money (and the space program, Big Data, media, energy,...

  (available from the author, contact@gjstevens.com ). ISBN: 9798714322549 I am not a fan of the zombie sub-genre of horror, although I have committed recently to reading more books featuring these brain-eating, often virus-produced, monsters. I have spent some time in previous reviews of books in this sub-genre examining the tropes and expressing my thoughts on why I think that they are more dangerous than tropes in other genres. It seems that just about anyone who has played some zombie video games and watched some zombie movies thinks they can write zombie novels, often a quickly produced series of them, with lots of body count and little character development or narrative. When the author contacted me about possibly reviewing one of his books, I seized the opportunity to engage more with zombies. I am glad, in this case, that I did. By talking about what I liked about Beginning of the End , I can better explain what I don’t like in most zombie films and novels. Stevens gi...

  (A Mike Stoneman Thriller, KDP, 2018). ISBN: 9781723898730 One of the challenges and joys of genre writing is employing a plethora of tried-and-true tropes while bringing in something original and ultimately unexpected. This is hard enough to do with larger genres like the crime thriller, never mind drilling down into smaller loops of the spiral, into the police procedural and, in the case of Righteous Assassin , into the serial killer police procedural. Within a few pages of Righteous Assassin , I felt deeply at home—not only because I teach about and have written numerous thrillers for the stage, page, screen, and Escape Rooms—but because Chapman was employing all of the genre’s prevalent tropes. His lead character, Mike Stoneman, is a hard-nosed Manhattan police detective who is single, impatient, and given to holding everyone around him to the high standards to which he holds himself. Consider his last name, Stone man, which is like Willy Lo man in Arthur Miller’s Death o...

   (Acme, Nadir, Fulcrum, and Pivot, 2021). ISBN: 978-0-578-96331-0 Earlier this year, I reviewed a new book called Convergence: The Interconnection of Extraordinary Experience by Barbara Mango, PhD and Lynn Miller, MS. Mango and Miller were also guests on my weekly livestream and we belong to an informal research group. The subject matter centers on near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, contact/unidentified aerial phenomena experience, and past life regression/recall. I am experiencer with three of the four. I have never had a near death experience. In all of these phenomena, there is one word that experiencers use in almost every case: transformative . Having been interested in Reverend Carter’s work for many years, I was excited by the opportunity to read and review his new book, Initiation . You will notice that “Transformation” appears in the title, as it focuses on contactee/abduction cases. A second subtitle reads, “A Guide for Contact Experiencers.” ...

  (2017). ISBN: 978-0-9991237-0-6 Wise ones have said (and I count my blessings every day that I have never had to test it) that the most unnatural thing in the world is a parent outliving their child. If the loss is related to suicide or drug use (and sometimes it is all too unclear) then the burden must be even worse to bear. Anne C. Cooper lost her youngest of three sons, Todd, when he was 16. The author’s journey to healing, forgiveness, and understanding is the core of this book, which is much more than a story about the death of a child. It is a brutally honest autobiography of a mother and wife’s experience of alcoholism across multiple generations, and the damage addiction does. Useful books on grieving are hard to find, although there are many (many) titles available on the subject. My favorites are Neil Donald Walsche’s Home with God: In a Life That Never Ends (which was invaluable in helping me process the loss of a spiritual mentor, who was also my aunt), Elain...