Joey Madia, New Mystics Reviews

    (New York: YBK Publishers, 2023). ISBN: 978-1-936411-84-9 While I cannot say it’s the same for everyone, I have found, in five and a half decades on Earth, that my most profound and valuable experiences in life are rarely about what I thought they’d be about. Perhaps that is why the maxim the journey is its own reward is so powerful for me. Lest I get to feeling too lonely in this philosophy, Nick Davies’s El Flamingo —in addition to being one of the strongest, most perfectly plotted novels I have read in several years—feels like a case in point. Lou Galloway, a frustrated actor whose Hollywood career isn’t very Hollywood and not much of a career, decides to leave it all behind and go to Mexico to lose himself and get past his most recent almost-but-not-quite Big Break in copious amounts of tequila, sea, and sand. After arriving in “Playa del something-or-other,” he is promptly pulled into an international intrigue that takes him to Columbia, where all of his consid...

  (A Mike Stoneman Thriller, KDP, 2018). ISBN: 9781723898730 One of the challenges and joys of genre writing is employing a plethora of tried-and-true tropes while bringing in something original and ultimately unexpected. This is hard enough to do with larger genres like the crime thriller, never mind drilling down into smaller loops of the spiral, into the police procedural and, in the case of Righteous Assassin , into the serial killer police procedural. Within a few pages of Righteous Assassin , I felt deeply at home—not only because I teach about and have written numerous thrillers for the stage, page, screen, and Escape Rooms—but because Chapman was employing all of the genre’s prevalent tropes. His lead character, Mike Stoneman, is a hard-nosed Manhattan police detective who is single, impatient, and given to holding everyone around him to the high standards to which he holds himself. Consider his last name, Stone man, which is like Willy Lo man in Arthur Miller’s Death o...

  (2021). ISBN: 9798677725210 I will be the first to admit, I am not a fan of zombies. I do like Zombieland , got a few laughs out of Return of the Living Dead recently, and enjoyed the third through fifth seasons of The Walking Dead . I was even a lead actor in a remake of White Zombie several years ago, although the Haitian-type zombies are another thing altogether. This is my first review, out of more than 230, to engage with the subject of this unique brand of monster, and I have made a commitment to get to know this subgenre better. I have another zombie book on my to-be-read list, so expect another review on the subject before the end of the year. As to Infection , it is a quick, action-filled read, which operates squarely in the zombie subgenre of horror/adventure, offering plenty of violence, gore, and all the tropes zombie fans love. It lies somewhere between The Walking Dead and Shaun of the Dead , the latter solely because good mates with everyday lives suddenly are...