Joey Madia, New Mystics Reviews

  (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...

(Deltona, FL: Thomas-Jacob Publishing, LLC, 2016), ISBN-13:   978-0-9979517-0-7 I am going to be up front here. I love this book, which is in large part due to its main character, Fleur Robins, daughter of an ultra-Conservative US Senator from Pennsylvania and an alcoholic mother who had Fleur as a teenager. Fleur is one of the most delightful, complex, and often contradictory child characters since Holden Caulfield in JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Sheila Tubman in Judy Blume’s Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great —two characters that had a profound impact on my childhood and, subsequently, my life. Perhaps it is my own growing fascination with Complexity and Chaos Theory, but I have been noticing a recent trend in storytelling—be it novels, television, or (to a lesser extent) film—that comes into play with Sharon Heath’s approach. It began with the male anti-hero in television shows like The Leftovers and Walking Dead , who is flawed, isolated, and oftentimes just pla...

by K. P. Ambroziak (Published by the author, 2014). ISBN: 9781500405359 I love most things vampire. I write about them, have shelves full of movies featuring them, and even more shelves filled with books, both fiction and historical studies, of the vampire phenomenon. I even have a bunch of favorite songs about them. Amidst all of these myriad materials, my love of vampires has a lot of restrictions and must-haves/must-not-haves—because there is a lot about vampires being written and filmed that misses their core Brutality. Their addiction to Blood is as fierce and all-pervasive as a heroin junky’s—and, when it is well done, the addiction drives them, in the end, to always show their fangs, no matter how much their charm has fooled us. The best vampires are not to be trusted, and they know it. They tell us so, over and over. They are prone to excuses and rationalizations. They are inclined toward boredom, infighting, and existential crisis. So, when a new book about vampires...