Joey Madia, New Mystics Reviews

    (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

  (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

   (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