Joey Madia, New Mystics Reviews

   (prepublication version, 2023). An echo of the Absurdist English tradition, The Diner at the Dawn of the Universe is 1984 meets Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy , with a hint of Terry Pratchett and Robert Anton Wilson. Existing in an un-time at a 20th-century Americana diner of the mind (to borrow from Ferlinghetti), this fast-paced juke-ramble unfolds in a dystopian/symmetrian universe, somewhere between “the itch and the scratch.” Think Kerouac’s On the Road , Bukowski’s “Nirvana,” and apropos episodes of The Twilight Zone , and you are nearly there, with entropy and quanta juicing up the jazz. Our protagonist is Dave, who came to work at this patina-of-entropy diner and wound up running the show when the owner/caretaker stepped out and never returned. Don’t feel bad for Dave—the food is served by replicators, ala The Jetsons and Star Trek . Note the name Dave. Names are simple here… there are Dick and Jane. Names are all that’s simple… A quarter of the way in...

  “This Is Not a Myth, Part 1”: A Review of Enuma Elish: The Original Text With Brief Commentary by Ken Goudsward (Dimensionfold Publishing, 2021). ISBN: 978-1-989940-39-6 Several weeks ago, I wrote a review of The Atrahasis Epic , which is actually the sequel to Enuma Elish . Although there are subtle differences in how certain peoples and events are portrayed between the two creation stories, there is an overall coherent picture of ancient exopolitics, computer engineering, and impressive biotech. Some background to start us off. Enuma Elish , which comes to us from Mesopotamia, is also called The Seven Tablets of Creation and is translated as “When on High.” Goudsward, an accomplished systems analyst and researcher (and author in his own right), uses a translation by W. G. Lambert as his basis for his groundbreaking commentary. Goudsward gives us all the tools we need to engage with and understand this complicated work. He gives us a cast of characters at the onset and a ...

  (Dimensionfold Publishing, 2023). ISBN: 978-1-989940-84-6 As part of my decades-long research into both mythology and UFOlogy, I have long been interested in the Mesopotamian creation and flood stories, including the cultures of the Mesopotamian region—the Assyrians, Sumerians, Babylonians, and Akkadians that set them into stone. The theories of Zecharia Sitchin are particularly appealing, related as they are to The Epic of Gilgamesh and the idea of interstellar travelers called the Annunaki coming to Earth and being mistaken for gods. Instinctually, this has always felt “right” to me. As I have come to know the polymath Ken Goudsward over the past six months, I have an ever-increasing appreciation and respect for his scholarship and theories. He is a serious, dedicated researcher and author who tells it as he sees it, as demonstrated in his commentary for his book with Barbara M. DeLong, Before Roswell: The Secret History of UFOs , a reference guide I use at least once a we...

  (Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 2021). ISBN: 978-0-7387-6445-0 For those who follow my blogs, read my novels, and listen to my podcast, it will come as no surprise that I embraced the opportunity to read and review this book and get to communicate with its talented author. I have been fascinated since I was a boy with all things werewolf and lupine. It of course began with films like The Wolf Man , although, as I got older and embarked on my journey as a writer and spiritual practitioner, I began to explore in increasing depth the history of European werewolves, Viking berserkers, Celtic/Teutonic werewolf lore, Absaroka and Navajo skinwalkers/shapeshifters, and animal totems. I also have a child who, during their teenage years, identified as a therian with a special relationship to the wolf—even wearing a two-foot faux wolf fur tail everywhere they went. First and foremost, I want you to be aware that Werewolf Magick is a serious work of scholarship and magickal pract...

  (Creative Short Book Writers Project, 2022). ISBN: 979-8351885292 At 423 pages, Within Grasp is a considered, detailed exploration of the possibility (probability?) that what was termed God in the Old Testament (and various books that were deemed “apocryphal” or otherwise unworthy [undesirable?] of what became the Bible) was actually extraterrestrial beings advanced enough to appear to humans as god-like . This thesis calls to mind Arthur C. Clarke’s third law that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Using numerous approaches: his own close reads of biblical passages; interviews with reverends, ex-military, spiritual practitioners, and lay people; and the complete texts of the Gospel of Thomas, Book of Enoch, Gospel of Mary, and Apocalypse of Baruch (the latter of which comprise roughly half the book), Wagner presents a compelling case. He also graciously leaves a great deal for us to work through on our own. Although the matter at hand is c...

(Dimensionfold Publishing, 2023). ISBN: 978-1-989940-77-8 As a spiritual practitioner, I believe in using a wide variety of tools in the quest for a fulfilling experience as I walk the “good red road.” Over the past two decades, I have collected a variety of Tarot and other guidance decks for my toolbox. Ranging from the traditional Tarot, to thematic versions (from baseball to pirates), to pathmaking, oracle, angel, archetype, and dream decks, I have used them with varying degrees of satisfaction. Some decks are akin to fortune cookie messages and horoscopes—too general to be of any use. Some get by solely on their images and themes. Several months ago, Barbara M. DeLong, podcast host, author, artist, ordained minister, and “seeker of the mysteries of spirituality,” after being a guest on my podcast to talk about the book she cowrote with Ken Goudsward, Before Roswell (based on the extensive research of her deceased husband), asked me to work with her Cosmic Deck of Initiation. I r...

  (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 inte...

    (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 consid...

  (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 s...

   (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 ...

 “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 meet...

  (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...

   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 Illumi...

   (Visionary Living Publishing, 2016). ISBN: 978-1-942157-04-5 A quick disclaimer to start. As many of you know, I am married to a talented psychic medium, and we have been an investigative team in the field of the paranormal for nearly a decade. My daughter is also a gifted psychic medium, and I have worked with and met several others over the years. The publisher of this book is also the publisher of a book that my wife and I wrote, Watch Out for the Hallway: Our Two-Year Investigation of the Most Haunted Library in North Carolina . That said, I believe that my experience with psychic mediums and with this publisher, whom I know to be highly respected and honest, makes me more—rather than less—qualified to give an equally honest review of this book. The first item of note about Absent Witness is that it goes into more detail about the author’s childhood/family life than many books by psychics. Having spent a good bit of time in Newark and Kearny, New Jersey, in my yo...