Joey Madia, New Mystics Reviews

  (New York: Shivering Pond Publishing, 2025). ISBN: 9781088146774 It’s hard to believe it’s been nearly four years since I reviewed E. Denise Billups’s Civil War/modern era ghost story Tainted Harvest . Since that time, the author has written two more books in the series and fourteen overall. I’m delighted to have the opportunity to read and review her latest. Similar to Tainted Harvest , this book, Beneath Beauford Grove , is also a ghost story, although with significant additional paranormal and horror elements. It takes place in multiple timelines in three locations—Haiti (not long after the slave rebellion that gave Saint-Domingue its independence from France and a new name), the fictional Beauford Grove in Alabama (in the 1800s and forward to the present), and modern-day Boston. It’s in Boston that the book opens, where the protagonist, Evangeline (Eva), is a hematologist struggling with a desperate pediatric case that calls for equally desperate decisions. The story un...

  by K. P. Ambroziak (Published by the author, 2017). ISBN: 9781548745073 Vampires have gotten increasingly complex. Sure, there was that blip with the Twilight series, where everything went a little backwards with the complexity and ferocity of the un-dead blood-sucker, but overall they have certainly changed with the times. The metaphors that drive human fascination with this particular breed of monster have morphed and expanded as technology and human relations have grown into their present state in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. In my previous reviews of this elegantly penned series, I have touched on much of this—the addiction metaphors, the lab-created blood sources and tropes of the dangers of scientific advancement, the origins in Western European fears of blood pollution by Eastern Europeans, the sexual metaphors springing from the suppression of the Victorian and Edwardian eras—and I don’t want to take up space repeating it. What I want to touch...

(Published by the author, 2016). ISBN: 9781535511193 by Joey Madia Why are we so satisfied with trilogies? I think of books like the Lord of the Rings cycle, the Blake Crouch Pines series, and the Oedipus cycle of Sophocles, and film series like The Matrix and the original Star Wars and I can think of little more satisfying than a triadic installment of a well-told tale.   In my book on storytelling I talk about trilogies and triads; about 3-Act structure and the Rule of 3s; and about Aristotle being the first to point out to us not only that good stories have a beginning, middle, and end, but what each of them should accomplish, a launching point I have built on for years in my “Three 3s of Good Storytelling” worksheets and workshops. There is no doubt that there is something fundamental in our DNA as storytellers and story absorbers that makes a trilogy one of the perfect delivery mechanisms for a tale worth sharing—sharing being a two-way feedback loop of writer–reader ...

 (Published by the author, 2015). ISBN: 9781514788370 Sequels, as ubiquitous as they have become in novels, film, and in television (through spin-offs and multiple seasons), are difficult to do well. As evidenced by the critically panned second season of True Detective and the multitude of sophomore albums by bands who come out of the gates with a strong first album, much of the difficulty with a follow-up project has to do with the long gestation period that a first work undergoes. In some cases, it is the culmination of decades of thought and trial and error, which elicits a deep passion and commitment from the artist that translates to the audience. Another reason is the simple fact that sequels are often about the economics of a follow-up rather than the truth about whether or not the main character has sufficient untold story left for a sequel. Often times, the initial Act 3 change in the Hero’s Journey is so profound that further examination of the main character’s li...

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...