Joey Madia, New Mystics Reviews

   (Night Vision Press, 2020). ISBN: 978-0-578-63344-2 Every so often, a book comes along that requires me to assess just where I am on the healthy skeptic continuum. Being a healthy skeptic is crucial to being a good paranormal investigator and researcher. It is not to be confused with being a cynic —a person for whom no amount of evidence will change their position that we live in a predictable, mechanistic universe where one lives and dies and is forever gone. I’m a mix of Mulder and Scully. I “want to believe” and know “the truth is out there,” but I also know we’re bombarded with false flag ops and disinformation, while some people are just looking for attention, memory is stunningly unreliable when tested, and there are mostly mundane explanations for what is initially termed paranormal or supernatural. I also believe that, one day, as science catches up to experience, there will only be the normal and the natural. We are getting there, slowly but surely. About a...

  (Hokstad Publishing, 2020). ASIN: B08NXXM64P In 2020 and early 2021 I wrote a number of reviews of novels in the dystopian future genre. As we were all locked inside and the future of the world grew more uncertain day by day, I had to add the caveat—although, to me, it is value-added—that these novels were in many ways less fiction and more handbooks for increasingly possible/probable futures. Although I have been a paranormal investigator for 12 years—a situation I fell into after a very strange encounter in 2009—I never thought I would put a novel like Vidar Hokstad’s The Year before the End in this same category. However, after the big ( public —it was well known and whispered about for years) unveiling of the U.S. Space Force, the recent and by and large hollow “disclosure” report, and the billionaire space race to colonize Mars and the Moon, this Old West–style space adventure is a cautionary tale about how it will most likely be corporate oligarchy meets military–indus...