Joey Madia, New Mystics Reviews

  (Brentwood, TN: CamCat Publishing, camcatpublishing.com, 2022). ISBN: 9780744304510 Along with abandoned castles, caves, and ancient forests, cornfields are immediately evocative of horror. Images of a pair of gloved hands pulling someone unexpectedly into high corn (something I filmed last autumn for one of my projects), the rats in the corn in Stephen King’s The Stand , scarecrows, and of course King’s Children of the Corn all bring a chill to the spine.   Then there are the entities known as faeries, which are not the cute little sprites that fill the pages of children’s books. Even Tinkerbell, before she was Disney-fied, kills Wendy in JM Barrie’s Peter Pan because she is jealous of her affection for Peter. Faery and UFO lore have significant overlaps (a fact touched on in this story) and the idea of parallel dimensions and the elements that make up a good faerie story—don’t eat the food, don’t invade their space, the exchanging of a human baby with a Changeling, b...

 (Garden City Park, NY: Square One Publishers, 2021). ISBN: 978 0 757055065. What If is one of the most powerful tools in the storyteller’s toolbox. From the earliest days of humankind, What If was a practical, educational, and at times life-saving tool before it later became an essential starting point for professional storytelling and entertainment. I used this technique for two and a half decades as a theatre-based social justice advocate, workshop presenter, and playwright working with middle and high school students. What If allows us to construct stories with enough resonance to evoke intellectual, physiological, philosophical, ideological, and practical responses in a safe, non-confrontational space. Because there is no immediate danger or serious consequences, participants in a What If exercise are free to take chances and explore options. What If encourages out of the box thinking and rewards participants with new, actionable insights. Terry Jastrow’s novel, The Trial of G...

 (Toronto: Synapz Productions, 2021). ISBN: 979-8-776-93093-5. Based on the Quebec Bridge Disaster of 1907, The Bridge began as a screenplay. From its dedication—“Big Tech: Actions have consequences”—and opening quote from Margaret Meade—“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world”—the author emphasizes the seriousness of the subject matter. In the present, the protagonists are Ben and Esther, senior-year engineering students at a Canadian university. Ben is a short-cut taking, system-gaming partier; Esther is serious and astute. When their professor pairs them for an Ethics project, sparks fly as they unpack the events of the Disaster. Using their project as a literary device, Palmer goes back in time to the precipitating events and tragic culmination, out of which, with the support of Kipling, came the advent of the Iron Ring ceremony (which the author knows firsthand). In a private ritual, graduating engineers are given a ring of ...

 (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.” ...