Review excerpt:
A jazz club in Tokyo, mysterious men in black suits, money owed, and bones are broken. Yes, just the perfect storyline for a noir title. Brindley writes settings and atmosphere so well. You are taken there and planted as you read. Whether it’s a crowded street corner, hospital waiting room, or local ramen diner, you will feel your surroundings.
JennaScribbles of Whispering Stories
Read the complete four-star review at Whispering Stories:
Review excerpt:
I read Rainy Season in one day. Not because it’s a fairly short novel (175 pages) but because I simply could not put it down. It is not a poorly-written imitation of a Noir Romance, it is a Noir Romance. The opening was absolutely spot-on for the genre; sublime, stylised, descriptive and cynical. All the scenes played through your mind in shades of grey and black with the permanent tattoo of the rain which, in so many ways, is another character.
Rose Auburn, Writing & Reviews
Read the complete five-star review at Rose’s website:
BOOK | FICTION | SHORT STORIES
WE ALL DIE IN THE END by Elizabeth Merry
RATING: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
If Joyce, Faulkner, and Kafka were to collaborate…
The result would be Elizabeth Merry’s We All Die in the End.
Merry’s is some of the best writing I’ve read in a while. Like Faulkner, she creates a fictional world unto its own, Faulkner’s set as a struggling Mississippi town, Merry’s as a struggling seaside town in Ireland, both populated with struggling characters with thick dialects common to their region.
However, regarding dialect, where Faulkner reveals his characters’ through heavy (and at times disruptive) word alteration and accent marks, Merry reveals her characters’ distinctive brogue (seemingly) effortlessly and without hardly a notice through beautiful setting descriptions and strategic use of words uncommon to those not of her world.
The effect of her writing to me is powerful…
And surreal…
Kafkaesque.
Merry’s nineteen interwoven stories, or scenes as identified in the book, often misled me into letting my guard down – getting me lost in the cold ocean spray or in the delectable odors stewing from the stove or in the broguish din of the local pub – lulling me into thinking all’s well (how could it not be in such a quaint little town with waves pounding the shore like a mesmerizing lullaby) until it slowly dawns upon me that all is not well in Merry’s little corner of the world. In fact, not until it’s too late do I realize that just about everything beneath the quaint veneer she has laid for us is in fact quite dark and bleak, and at times… quite deadly.
We All Die in the End has left me with a haunting literary hangover.
And for that, I am grateful…
For, as rare as it is, it is that exact aftereffect I yearn for in every book I read.
BOOK | FICTION | SHORT STORIES
A GATHERING OF BUTTERFLIES by Sean C. Wright
RATING: ★ ★ ★ ★
Tales of steely but vulnerable women of color will melt your heart while lifting your spirits…
Book Description from Amazon
A fierce grandmother keeps her grandson from the clutches of Old Scratch in Devil Does Dallas.
An alien abduction transforms a large, miserable woman in Hazel Hogan.
A country girl meets a city girl on her birthday, and struggles to decide if the girl’s heart is dark or light in Bubble Bath Twelve.
And methodical Genie forms an unlikely relationship in Heaven’s Halfway House while in a coma.
I am in wholehearted concurrence with Amazon reviewer Neferet when they opine that “[Author Sean C. Wright’s GATHERING OF BUTTERFLIES] is a nice collection of interesting and clever short stories….”
Nice, indeed.
And I feel nicer as a human being for having read this diminutive collection of pithy and powerful (a redundancy I know, but one worth repeating) folksy parables; and I could tell without a doubt from reading them that the author herself is nice…
Really nice.
I just wish there had been more nice stories to appreciate — there are only four and the collection as a whole weighs in at just over a hundred pages.
Three of the stories are good, written light and fast with limited (but enough) character and setting development as one would expect to find in such folksy parables and morality tales.
However, one of the stories — Bubble Bath Twelve — is exceptional. I got so very and happily lost within that wonderful, beautiful tale and I regretted it when finally finding myself at its end. It compares easily with the best of anything William Faulkner has written, if the boozy, self-hating grouch were to have written such nice, lighthearted stories that didn’t stress the reader out with their unrelenting and migraine-inducing dialect.
Yeah, the story’s that good.
Outside of expanding this fine collection with more stories, I would recommend the author consider a more professional book cover. Personal preference, perhaps, but I think such fine writing deserves something a little better than its present adornment.
So, fantastic work by Ms. Wright, work that I highly recommend. I also recommend checking out her website. While it’s a little confusing to navigate, there the determined reader can find a treasure trove of her equally fun and interesting flash fiction, which, if you recall, is how all who gather here first became acquainted with her fine work.
SEANARCHY.WORDPRESS.COM
I would like to sincerely thank Ms. Gina Rae Mitchell for taking the time to read The Good Kill and write such a fantastic review for it.
I could tell when first visiting Gina’s website packed full of book reviews, author interviews, and all kinds of other interesting information from gardening tips to tasty recipes that hers was a platform I would love to get my book profiled on. So, as you can imagine, I was very grateful when she responded in the affirmative to my review request.
And grateful I am indeed for throughout the entire time it took from my initial request to Gina posting the review today, it has been nothing but a pleasure to work and correspond with her.
Right from the beginning I signed up for her newsletter and I’m glad I did because it offers way more than just links to her latest book reviews. Had I not been on her list I would have never known to add apple cider vinegar to my bone broth to better soften the bones so my dogs/boys can better enjoy them without me having to worry about them choking on a shard!
There’s so much cool stuff on her site that you’re sure to be amazed when you head over there to read her review of my book.
So be on your way now to Gina’s site… and don’t forget to sign up for her newsletter!
Thanks, Gina!
BOOK | FICTION | HUMOR
THE TELEPORTER
LEE HALL
RATING: ★ ★ ★ ★
What if there was a power like no other? What if one drunken slouch happened to stumble where nobody has stumbled before and discovered the ability to teleport!
Publisher’s Book Description
Just when you thought there were enough super hero stories in this world, we made another one…
Kurt Wiseman is your average mid-twenties slouch with a serial thirst for alcohol, that is until destiny calls upon him to stumble where no man has clumsily stumbled before. By day he works for a familiar sounding, power hungry, media controlling, mega rich American businessman who represents everything wrong with society today. Whilst investigating this politically loaded story arc Kurt accidentally acquires a super power like no other. The ability to teleport!
Before he can think about saving the day, Wiseman must endure a journey of self-reflection by earning the trust of his friends and overcoming his greatest weakness, booze. Even if the path is filled with comic book cliché, inappropriate one liners and genre busting fourth wall action.
Not all heroes in this world are the same and with great power comes the possibility to go viral! This is a story that will unite humanity…
Kurt Wiseman is the Teleporter!
This is a fun, breezy read of a book that delivers on exactly what the author set out for it to do, and that is, essentially, to have it be a fun, breezy read of a book.
How do I know this? Because we’re told as much in an author’s note at the end of the book.
“I set out to create this story with one goal in mind, which was above all, to make people laugh…” – Lee Hall
Mission accomplished, Mr. Hall.
And not only does our besodden superhero Kurt Wiseman (cool name) humor us with his meh Millennial mentality, he does so while locked in a life-or-death battle with the (stereo)typically corrupt corporate (never noticed how similar the words corrupt and corporate are in appearance until now) tech executive and his conglomerate of clownish henchmen, all while reminding us along the way of the dangers and unintended consequences of technology run amok, among other timely and topically important issues of the day.
Now, would I liked to have found the story with more fully developed characters and settings? Sure. But we must remember our tale is narrated by our slacker superhero so the sparsity in development can be considered almost apropos, as it leaves me feeling as I did as a parent when dealing with my own similarly-aged Millennial offspring who are equally adept at providing just enough information needed to keep them out of any serious trouble.
Bottom line: this is an all-around enjoyable book. Simple as that. So…
Read it.
Laugh with it.
BOOK | FICTION | LITERARY
THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME
DONALD RAY POLLOCK
AUDIOBOOK
RATING: ★ ★ ★ ★★
Set in rural southern Ohio and West Virginia, The Devil All the Time follows a cast of compelling and bizarre characters from the end of World War II to the 1960s. There’s Willard Russell, tormented veteran of the carnage in the South Pacific, who can’t save his beautiful wife, Charlotte, from an agonizing death by cancer no matter how much sacrificial blood he pours on his “prayer log.” There’s Carl and Sandy Henderson, a husband-and-wife team of serial killers, who troll America’s highways searching for suitable models to photograph and exterminate. There’s the spider-handling preacher Roy and his crippled virtuoso-guitar-playing sidekick, Theodore, running from the law. And caught in the middle of all this is Arvin Eugene Russell, Willard and Charlotte’s orphaned son, who grows up to be a good but also violent man in his own right.
From the Book Description
First let me point out that the title of this book is THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME. It’s not The Devil Some of the Time or The Devil Every Once in a While. I repeat, it’s The Devil All the Time. This is an important point, one that all the up-in-arms one-star reviewers of the book complaining about it having no redeeming characters seem to have somehow missed.
Little details like book titles do matter folks.
So yeah, with a title like that you shouldn’t be surprised when finding that it’s a gritty, grimy, nasty, corrupt, vulgar tale of a story that thoroughly explores the deep dark levels of depravity to which our inhumane human-ness is capable of descending.
It’s also beautifully written with a complex twisting of storylines that straighten themselves out nicely as one in the end, if not a bit too conveniently so as some of the negative reviewers point out and which I somewhat agree with them there.
But only somewhat.
The part of the publisher’s book description that I didn’t include above states essentially that The Devil All the Time is a mashup of “the twisted intensity of Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers with the religious and Gothic overtones of Flannery O’Connor at her most haunting.”
There were several reviewers who seem to consider it sacrilegious to compare this work to O’Connor’s, the literary icon that she is. I kind of have to agree with them. Certainly not so vehemently, nor even for the same reasons, but because I got more of a William Faulkner vibe from it than an O’Connor.
But that’s just literary semantics. The book is an exceptional read in its own right.
What made it an especially exceptional read for me is that the audiobook version is narrated by master voice actor Mark Bramhall. I was fortunate to discover Bramhall’s genius when reading Christopher Buehlman’s wonderful horror tale THOSE ACROSS THE RIVER, and it was in search of more of his genius that I came across this book of which I am now reviewing for your entertainment and instruction.
Okay, all that’s fine and dandy; but want to know what impresses me most about The Devil All the Time?
Too bad. Ima tell you anyway.
What impresses me most about the work is the author himself, Mr. Donald Ray Pollock.
Not only is Pollock originally from the area of which his depressed story is set, he depressingly dropped out of school at seventeen and, after a (depressing?) stint at a meat packing plant, spent the next thirty-two (depressing?) years working as a laborer in a paper mill.
Don’t know if it all was as depressing as it seems, but it sure seems as if Pollock is trying to play it up that way in his bio.
Regardless, he, at some point, decided he wanted to be a writer so, at the age of forty-nine, he went ahead and enrolled in the MFA program at Ohio State University.
How cool is that?
How brave is that?!
I can’t imagine the courage it must have taken for him to follow his literary dreams at such an advanced age, especially knowing that to do so he would have to expose himself so openly before classroom’s full of young and exceedingly idealistic whippersnappers, most of whom probably never once had to worry about their parents not covering their expenses, let alone worry about the real life challenges this often dark and dangerous world will offer them once they’re out of the controlled college environment and having to provide for themselves.
Yeah…
This old dude Pollock is now this old dude Brindley’s newest hero.
And, btw, not only does Pollack have more guts than I’ll ever have, his first novel, as dark and disturbing and sans morality as it may be…
Is frikkin’ amazing.
Featured image courtesy of the author’s official website
BOOK | FICTION | LITERARY
THE DISTANT SOUND OF VIOLENCE
JASON GREENSIDES
RATING: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Do we ever escape the decisions we make when we’re fifteen?
Amazon Book Description
Nathan Dawes, the loser from school, an outsider, street philosopher and member of The Grove Runners gang, needs Ryan’s help to get Stephanie to fall for him. When Ryan’s lawnmower is stolen, Nathan sees this as his chance to enlist Ryan in his plan.
Although Ryan knows becoming friends with Nathan could lead to trouble, he reluctantly agrees to help.
Stephanie wants nothing to do with either of them. Besides, she’s more interested in the one guy in the world she really shouldn’t be.
As Nathan continues his pursuit of Stephanie, and Ryan gets mixed up with The Grove Runners, soon events overtake them all, haunting their lives for years to come.
Part coming of age, part mystery story, The Distant Sound of Violence is a heartbreaking tale of bad decisions and love gone wrong. It’s about choices that lead to violence, loss and tragedy.
THE DISTANT SOUND OF VIOLENCE by Jason Greensides is a hauntingly atmospheric tour de force with its stark and captivating descriptions of English life during the Nineties and beyond set in, on, and around the mean streets of London, its fully-fleshed characters as flawed and true-to-life as any character on a page can be, and its ringing dialogue that is at times achingly smart, witty, and/or sad, and that is always cut with just the right amount of a pleasingly rhythmic patios.
Not to say that I didn’t have some quibbles with this masterwork. At over 500 pages, I thought the narrator interjecting his personal story from time to time, while interesting enough to some extent, didn’t add enough value to the overall arc and purpose of the story to merit the lengthy interjections. Specifically, there is one part of the book where the narrator again interjects himself and becomes oddly obsessive in trying to track down and map out the locations of mysterious graffiti tags left by Nathan Dawes, our also oddly obsessive (but oddly obsessive with clear purpose) protagonist; where, in the end, all the time and effort spent in the narrator’s mapping of the tags served no revealing purpose that I can tell except to further highlight something that we already knew — that our protagonist is oddly obsessive to a life-wrecking fault.
But again, these are mere quibbles and ones not nearly severe enough to lower this grateful reader’s overall five-star ranking of this highly intriguing and highly recommended epic of a read.
BOOK | FICTION | HORROR
THE LESSER DEAD
CHRISTOPHER BUEHLMAN
AUDIOBOOK
RATING: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
The secret is, vampires are real and I am one.
Amazon Book Description
The secret is, I’m stealing from you what is most truly yours and I’m not sorry…
New York City in 1978 is a dirty, dangerous place to live. And die. Joey Peacock knows this as well as anybody—he has spent the last forty years as an adolescent vampire, perfecting the routine he now enjoys: womanizing in punk clubs and discotheques, feeding by night, and sleeping by day with others of his kind in the macabre labyrinth under the city’s sidewalks.
The subways are his playground and his highway, shuttling him throughout Manhattan to bleed the unsuspecting in the Sheep Meadow of Central Park or in the backseats of Checker cabs, or even those in their own apartments who are too hypnotized by sitcoms to notice him opening their windows. It’s almost too easy.
Until one night he sees them hunting on his beloved subway. The children with the merry eyes. Vampires, like him…or not like him. Whatever they are, whatever their appearance means, the undead in the tunnels of Manhattan are not as safe as they once were.
And neither are the rest of us.
Except for the originals — Shelley’s Monster; Stoker’s Dracula; Stevenson’s Mr. Hyde, etc. — when it comes to horror, regardless the medium, whether it be movies or books (although, nightmares get a pass — nothing like a good monster trying to chase me down and rip me to shreds in my dreams), I typically will give a hard pass to any story with a monster in it. Not sure why… maybe because I find that most are just too goofy to suspend reality enough for me to enjoy them.
But I tell you what, I love Christopher Buehlman’s monsters like no man should ever love a monster.
THE LESSER DEAD is my third book by Buelhman — THOSE ACROSS THE RIVER and SUICIDE MOTORCYCLE CLUB are the other two and both are outstanding reads in their own right. However, by comparison, TLD is a completely exceptional read, a pure literary masterwork, not just as a genre novel, but as a true literary novel. But even regarding it just as a horror novel, by comparison with its angsty and vulgar (vampire) coming of age vibe to it, I would say it ranks as the THE CATCHER IN THE RYE of its genre if I didn’t think TCITR was so grossly over rated. But regardless, to me TLD, although a much more complete body of work than TCITR in my opinion, deserves such similar acclaim among its contemporaries as TCITR enjoys among its. Not to mention TLD has an ending that is pure literary genius.
As if that weren’t enough, Buehlman himself narrates the audiobook and his skills as a voice actor are equal to his skills as an author.
The dude’s for real folks.
#whythefhaventanyofthisdudesbooksbeenmadeintoamovie
Featured image courtesy of Goodreads
BOOK | FICTION | HORROR
THE ELEMENTALS
BY MICHAEL MCDOWELL
RATING: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
As they used to say back in my navy days regarding the structure of military correspondence: always put the bottom line first…
So, in harking back to days long past, I’ll (kind of) begin this non-military correspondence with the proverbial bottom line…
BOTTOM LINE >> THE ELEMENTALS just may be my favorite horror novel of all time.
I’m not ready yet to call McDowell’s wonderfully written Southern Gothic horror the favorite because there are a few other wonderfully written horror novels that are also in the running, one or two of which I hope to review in rapid fashion here one of these days.
But what puts THE ELEMENTALS in the running for being the best of the best is, not so much that it is scary — when you’re as old as I am and have been through as much BS as I’ve been through, you’ll find that words on a page, regardless how well written and who writes them, no longer have the ability to scare… and that’s unfortunate — but that it is powerfully descriptive.
I was overwhelmed with its haunting descriptions so completely and cast within its magical spell of verisimilitude so deeply, that it really seemed as if I could feel the oppressive Alabama Gulf Coast heat, or as if the constant glare off the steaming hot white sand was really blinding my eyes, or as if the aged Victorian beach houses were really being overcome by the creeping and creepy dunes… all of which stayed with me long after I finished reading the masterpiece.
Man*, I really, REALLY, love books that do me like that…
I only wish it would happen more often.
BOOK | FICTION | PSYCHOLOGICL THRILLER
NIGHT FILM
BY MARISHA PESSL
RATING: ★ ★ ★ ★
Night Film by Marisha Pessl is a haunting mystery with a complex, engrossing story and complex, intriguing characters, especially Stanislas Cordova, a creepy, reclusive cultish film director who I wish to the literary gods was a real person.
