Joey Madia, New Mystics Reviews

 (Kindle, 2020). ASIN: B08QBHC98R. On September 12, 2001, I threw about two and a half feet of Tom Clancy books into a dumpster because, when fiction started to feel like fact, there was no point in reading that kind of fiction anymore. A decade later, average citizens in America and the world are suffering from a social media society that cannot tell the difference between fact and fiction (a condition that the Corporate Oligarchy Military–Industrial–Intelligence Complex, or COMIIC, has not only created but of which it has made sinister use). The COMIIC’s agenda and messaging affect responses to and beliefs about climate change, supposedly democratic elections (have they ever been?), COVID-19, and the Federal Reserve/Stock Market/cryptocurrency. These practices have created a condition where 1 percent (probably far less after the past two years of pandemic-era money grabbing) of the U.S. population controls 99 percent of the money (and the space program, Big Data, media, energy,...

  (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...

  (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...

   (Acme, Nadir, Fulcrum, and Pivot, 2021). ISBN: 978-0-578-96331-0 Earlier this year, I reviewed a new book called Convergence: The Interconnection of Extraordinary Experience by Barbara Mango, PhD and Lynn Miller, MS. Mango and Miller were also guests on my weekly livestream and we belong to an informal research group. The subject matter centers on near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, contact/unidentified aerial phenomena experience, and past life regression/recall. I am experiencer with three of the four. I have never had a near death experience. In all of these phenomena, there is one word that experiencers use in almost every case: transformative . Having been interested in Reverend Carter’s work for many years, I was excited by the opportunity to read and review his new book, Initiation . You will notice that “Transformation” appears in the title, as it focuses on contactee/abduction cases. A second subtitle reads, “A Guide for Contact Experiencers.” ...

  (2017). ISBN: 978-0-9991237-0-6 Wise ones have said (and I count my blessings every day that I have never had to test it) that the most unnatural thing in the world is a parent outliving their child. If the loss is related to suicide or drug use (and sometimes it is all too unclear) then the burden must be even worse to bear. Anne C. Cooper lost her youngest of three sons, Todd, when he was 16. The author’s journey to healing, forgiveness, and understanding is the core of this book, which is much more than a story about the death of a child. It is a brutally honest autobiography of a mother and wife’s experience of alcoholism across multiple generations, and the damage addiction does. Useful books on grieving are hard to find, although there are many (many) titles available on the subject. My favorites are Neil Donald Walsche’s Home with God: In a Life That Never Ends (which was invaluable in helping me process the loss of a spiritual mentor, who was also my aunt), Elain...

   (Visionary Living Publishing, 2021). ISBN: 978-1-94217-56-4 A few disclaimers to start. My wife Tonya and I have investigated some of the locations discussed in this book. The author also references some of our findings as they pertain to the Greene County Historical Society and Museum, which we have investigated with him on several occasions. We are listed in the Acknowledgments and one of our books is listed in the Further Reading section. That said, we have been visiting and investigating southwestern Pennsylvania for more than a decade—well before we were introduced to Kevin Paul by his coauthor on the first book in this series, the now deceased Rosemary Ellen Guiley. We have friends who own considerable acreage in the area, and we have done several home and business investigations and haunting mitigations in the county independent of our work with the author. If you read the bestselling Haunted Hills and Hollows , you’ll notice that Paul takes a slightly differen...

 (Odyssey Books, 2021). ISBN: ISBN: 978-1922311238 (ebook) The Amber Crane is richly researched historical fiction with complex metaphors and a touch of magical realism. Before you begin, have a look at the cover, which holds a clue: a squadron of World War II planes and, amidst them, a crane carved in a chunk of amber. Once you begin to read, you’ll see that the story primarily takes place in 1644, during The Thirty Years’ War (although no one living and fighting in that time knew how long it would be). The story’s protagonist is Peter, who is training under a master to join the amber guild and become a paternostermaker , so named because they mostly made rosary beads. Like my 22-year-old daughter, Peter has never known life without war, and it has touched him in many ways. His older brother Lorenz—handsome, charming, and popular—who served in Queen Christina of Sweden’s Army, was killed during the war, although it was not combat related. Peter’s mother died of grief at the...