Joey Madia, New Mystics Reviews

(Outskirts Press, 2025). ISBN: 978-1-9772-7562-2 A tried and true adage for first-time novelists is write what you know. Writing novels is a difficult endeavor (as W. Somerset Maugham famously quipped, “There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are”) and the seasoned author controls everything they can. According to George Yuhasz’s back-cover bio, he is a “former US Government special agent, intelligence officer, and contractor. He has also worked in the private sector as an investigator and security consultant.” It is clear he wrote about what he knows in Righteous Allegiance , which takes far-right White Christian Nationalism, especially among former members of the military, as its central subject. Written with the technical expertise of an insider (I mentored a novelist for many years who was a former lieutenant colonel in Army intelligence, and I recognize the signs), Righteous Allegiance is topical and frightening. Yuhasz’s extremists ar...

ISBN: 978-0-9600201-0-2 (paperback) DISCLOSURE: For four years the author of this collection of short stories, plays, essays, and poems was a student in my creative writing classes held through an extension program offered by a community college in West Virginia. Most of the pieces that create the seemingly disparate yet unified tapestry of this collection were developed in those classes; I edited many to varying degrees and published early versions of The Watchman’s Rainbow at the literary site for which I am Founding Editor, www.newmystics.com . That said, my objectivity could rightly be put into question. With sensitivity to such a probable circumstance, what follows is more of a book report than a book review . I have chosen this modification of my approach over the prospect of abandoning the work altogether for one simple reason: These works are well written, exquisitely researched, and, as the author tells us in several of his Author Notes to the various sections, he ha...