Little Darlings: A Novel

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Review by Paige Ambroziak

I went into “Little Darlings” knowing it was a supernatural thriller inspired by Grimm’s fairy tales, but I didn’t realize I’d experience such textured prose. Golding’s ability to spin a story with language is beyond skillful. She’s downright gifted. She pulls you in. Well, actually, she kind of grips you, her text’s curling tendrils clamping down and jerking you inside. The wince-worthy details, the evocative descriptors, the elegant way she describes some of the most gory moments of bodily harm due to childbirth, all of it feeds your imagination. Her writing calls to mind Neil Gaiman’s. There’s a layering to the work of both writers that makes the reader feel as if she sinks into their stories, like feet in quicksand or hands into mud.

Here, Golding sets the stage for a psychological thriller that has you questioning her main character’s delusions. Are they delusions? Is she reliable? She’s sleep-deprived, literally drained of her sustenance, and her husband’s behavior toward her may be categorized as abusive. After delivering her twin boys, she’s kind of abandoned, at least mentally. It’s no wonder she experiences what she does. Golding does such a valid job of making insanity plausible. If anything, this story is a cautionary tale for pregnancy — not motherhood. It’s the trauma of delivery that leaves the scars. Continue reading →

Return of the Butterfly

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“The Promise of the Void”: A Review of Sharon Heath’s Return of the Butterfly, The Fleur Trilogy, Book 3

Review by Joey Madia

Before you read another word of this review, be sure you’ve done one of the following two things (or, if you are feeling generous, both):

1. Read the previous two books in this series
2. Read my reviews of the first two books in the series

Now we can proceed.

There is an ancient Chinese curse that says, “May you live in interesting times.”

Are we cursed? It certainly seems so. The world is, if not IN chaos, on the brink of it. The United States finds itself at a level of Us and Them and Othering that is probably the greatest since the sixties—and there is every reason to believe that this state of things has been carefully engineered. The past two times I’ve left my writing room to go have dinner with friends, the conversation devolved into line demarcating and political posturing. Even when I politely asked that we talk about something else, they persisted. It was Important to them that I understood their Position. The news, such as it is, is a daily feed of Greed, Hatred, and dark prognoses for our planet and its populations—human, animal, and plant.

I would not normally begin a review in such a way, except that it is unavoidable after reading Return of the Butterfly. It is chock full of these struggles, all illuminated, talked about, and worried about by a cast of characters that the readers of this trilogy have come to love, dislike, root for, root against, and, if they are truly honest, measure their own worldviews by. Continue reading →

Visitations & Conversations

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Review by Joey Madia

A disclaimer to start. I am a paranormal researcher who is married to a psychic medium. My daughter is also a psychic medium. Given the sad fact that, in this day and age, a war is still being waged by many in the scientific community and other gatekeepers and cynics against giving any legitimacy to mediumship and investigative study of the paranormal, it may be easy for someone to simply say, as many do when I try to explain these things, that “You already believe, so you cannot be objective.”

That statement makes no sense. I do, however, believe that there is life in some form after death. I also believe there are portals and multiple dimensions and sentient beings that vibrate at a higher level than living human beings and so do not behave according to traditional scientific laws. And I believe that an understanding of mediumship and what we call the paranormal is vital to the progression of the human race beyond its current and very limited way of living. A little research will show you that, for over 60 years, the United States, United Kingdom, and many other countries have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the study and exploitation of these areas. Continue reading →

Beneath the Fungoid Moon

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Review by Joey Madia

I have known Chuck Regan and his work for a long time. Three decades, actually. I started as a fan of his comic books, including Nether Age of Maga—a post-apocalyptic vision that’s everything from Plato to P. K. Dick. His skills as an artist—he’s known for his attention to detail and authenticity in his science fiction–based designs—translate successfully into prose. Regan has always had fun using made up words and he incorporates just the right amount of pop culture references in his work to give us grounding in the odd.

Regan’s vision has always been dark, but with touches of comedy and hope in all the right places. He opens his About the Author section at the end of this collection by saying he’s technically not an author because he has yet to publish a novel. But I’ve read several of his longer works in whole or in part, and “author” certainly applies. He is as much a technician of the craft of storytelling as any author I know. He’s even created a workbook for writers of long-form stories called Give Your Hero Bad Breath: A Character, Plot and World-Building Workbook that I have incorporated into my starting routine for new stories.

Beneath the Fungoid Moon is a collection of seven short stories, each with an opening passage about the history of the piece. For budding writers and those who want to see how the sausage gets made for writers in the thorny world of publishing, these introductions are invaluable. Continue reading →

It was a Small Affair

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A Review by Joey Madia

It has been my pleasure over the past six years or so to review Ken Hart’s science fiction novels. This will be my third. My previous reviews were of Behind the Gem and The Eyes Behold Tomorrow.

Hart brings a lot of heart to his sci-fi. His previous two novels deal with family and reproductive issues and his stories explore what happens when distinct binary groups—be they male–female, human–nonhuman, or past–present—interact.

His latest novel, It was a Small Affair, focuses on the third binary—past–present.

The past is the confrontation at the Alamo in 1836 between the Mexican general Santa Anna (whose derisive remarks after the battle provide the novel’s title) and Travis, Houston, Bowie, Crockett, and Co. Texas’s independence from Mexico was at stake, and the Texans were badly outnumbered.

There is a great deal of romanticism and myth that surrounds the Alamo. It has been the subject of many books (fiction and nonfiction), films, and TV mini-series. Continue reading →