Joey Madia, New Mystics Reviews

  (Self-published, 2024). ISBN: 978-1-304-32531-0 Let me be up front. I am a longtime fan of this gifted writer and artist. His comic strip about two Moai on Easter Island, Monumental , is exclusive to my art and literary site, New Mystics. Pendleton illustrated the covers of two of my novels, as well as doing many additional illustrations for them. I am honored to have his art throughout my home. A few decades ago, I was privileged to read some of his unpublished short stories, about false memories, among other provocative topics. One scene in particular, involving a man in a bar getting a full-body tattoo, has stayed with me as though I read it yesterday. But I am not doing this review to talk in depth about any of those projects. The subject matter at hand is his long-awaited novel, More Argonauts: Another Argonautica . If you like Greek—and many other—myths, then this is a book for you. By way of warning (and no reader really should be warned, nor any writer have to suffer ...

The Underside of Flight is a stark, poetic chronicle of one artist’s journey into the darkness brought on by losing his job after 10 years and facing the uncertainties that poured forth from such a deep, piercing wound. It is a collection of 120+ pieces categorized as Poems, the writer’s own Quotes (e.g., “Life is a granting of living; when is the last time you lived?”), and Mind-Blasts (e.g., “Some of my favorite madmen were scholars of their craft”). The collection opens with a page full of dedications to family and friends—a signal that although the word-shaman has gone into the wilderness, alone, to seek the darkest of caves and deepest of rivers, he has not forsaken his vital connection to his Tribe. These works are some of the most raw, honest, and at times brutal that I have read in quite some time. The artist wrote with his mental blood as he bled and was not so presumptuous or cowardly to feel the need to go back and cover his tracks, soften his truths, or make any apologies i...