For the Weekend 2

I’m not a fan of social media. For the most part, IMO, it is a massive, non-productive time suck. Having written that, I want to qualify the statement by saying, every cloud has a silver lining — and that includes social media.

I’ve met some fantastic writers on Facebook and Twitter — people I’d never have otherwise met.

And many, if not most, of those writers are in the same position I am: their book sales are so low they are invisible on Amazon and elsewhere.

So I do my part to help promote my fellow writers. To promote good books that aren’t going to show in the first few pages of Amazon search results. Books that live somewhere below the top 300,000 in the paid Kindle store.

Today, I want to draw your attention to Don’t Dream It’s Over by Matthew Cormack.

If my memory serves me right, I met Matthew on Facebook. He refers to himself as a weekend writer. A hobbyist who is nevertheless serious about crafting a memorable story.

The world of the post-apocalyptic Piranha Pandemic is terrifyingly real. It is exactly how I see the survivors of a worldwide disaster coping — both the positive and negative, the good and the bad. The worldbuilding is stunningly realistic.

Don’t Dream It’s Over is the first book set in the Piranha Pandemic world. I don’t want to gush, so I’ll simply say — I love this book.

Cormack has the ability to create characters so complexly real you think you’ve met them before. They are flesh and bones, meat and potatoes real.

He has uncanny psychological insight into how people act under stress and imparts that realism to his characters.

Don’t Dream It’s Over is told in a diary format that Cormack handles with aplomb. The narrative is natural. The narrator, Peter, draws you into his tale. It’s as if he is writing to you. Telling you his story.

Don’t Dream It’s Over has all the makings of a classic. The writing is better than that found in S. Fowler Wright’s classics Deluge and Dawn. The world is more realistic than that of George R  Stewart’s Earth Abides and John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids.

Don’t Dream It’s Over is an amazing book by an amazing storyteller. Take a trip to a world that doesn’t exist, but very well could, all while sitting in your easy chair. And if you do, you’ll be prepared should COVID become truly terrifying.

You can get Don’t Dream It’s Over on Amazon for only 99¢, or for free on KU!

To Build a World

Worldbuilding, while often thought of as something only fantasy and science fiction writers need to do, is actually something all authors engage in.

The New York of Nero Wolfe isn’t exactly the New York that actually exists. It is a carefully constructed version that suits the storytelling of Rex Stout.

My Justinia Wright series is set in Minneapolis. But it is not quite the same Minneapolis that currently exists. The Minneapolis of Justinia Wright is a fictionalized version that suits the needs of the story.

The Pierce Mostyn series, although set in the present day, is a fictionalized version of today. The world building is much more subtle, than say Neverland, or Oz, or Barsoom, or Pellucidar, or any of the Star Trek worlds, but it is still worldbuilding.

This is because fiction is, well, to be honest, a lie. Stories are not reality. They’re entertainment. And to be successful entertainment they need to be lifelike, but not real life.

Take “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson. The setting is small-town America of the 1940s (the story was published in 1948). But it is no small town that actually existed then. What small town annually stoned to death one of its citizens? Jackson created a world that was mostly normal, save for that little part that wasn’t. Superbly horrific worldbuilding.

For Pierce Mostyn, while there is much that is “normal”, there is much that is not. There is much that is made up or borrowed from the Cthulhu Mythos.

Kathy Edens, in World-Building 101: How to construct an unforgettable universe for your fantasy or sci-fi story (published by ProWritingAid), gives us three rules of worldbuilding:

1. Creating a new world goes way beyond mere setting
2. Use other author’s worlds to inspire your own
3. Don’t make new world your story’s focus

In Pierce Mostyn, the setting is the contemporary world. However, it doesn’t stop there. Monsters exist. Weapons and devices exist in Mostyn’s world that don’t exist in ours. Geography is manipulated to suit the needs of the story. Pierce Mostyn’s world is one where monsters and terrifying aliens are alive and bent on our destruction, unbeknownst to the population at large.

To build Pierce Mostyn’s world, I borrowed from The X-Files and Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos — and then added stuff from my imagination. The world may look a lot like our own, but it is as fantastical as Oz.

And while Mostyn and his team hunt monsters to save us from annihilation or enslavement, the stories ultimately deal with people and the larger issues of life. Cthulhu is as important as our reaction to him.

There are now 7 books in the Pierce Mostyn Paranormal Investigations series, with an 8th in the works, and a 9th on the drawing board.

I hope you enjoy reading about Mostyn and his world as much as I enjoy writing about them.

Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy reading!

For the Weekend

I’m starting a new feature. On Fridays (although perhaps not every Friday) I’m going to recommend books for your weekend reading pleasure.

As regular readers of this blog know, reading is my favorite form of entertainment. And I’d like it to become yours. Movies and TV shows are okay, but there is nothing like a book or short story to get the imagination firing on all cylinders. And family reading time is absolutely magical. You don’t have to read all on your own!

Today, I want to draw your attention to a series and a short story.

The Boom Town Saga by Caleb Pirtle III

I’m currently reading Book 3 of this fantastic historical saga that focuses on finding oil in the 1930s and how the discovery changes, or doesn’t change, lives.

The central characters of the series are con-man/miracle worker Doc Bannister and Eudora Durant, once hometown beauty queen, now wife of a good for nothing husband who beats her and cheats on her.

In Doc and Eudora, Pirtle gives us people who are very real, yet larger-than-life. And their precarious love story adds spice to an already exciting series.

Couple the fabulous characters with Pirtle’s nearly magical writing that makes the past come alive, and you have the ingredients for powerful storytelling. And The Boom Town Saga is powerful story telling at its finest.

You can find the series at Amazon. And for a limited time, Book 3 is only 99¢.

The Boom Town Saga is a very satisfying way to while away the weekend.

Love’s Enigma by Breakfield and Burkey

Charles V Breakfield and Roxanne E Burkey are new to me writers. They are the authors of the 11 book Techno-Thriller Enigma series.

I haven’t read the series. I picked up the short story “Love’s Enigma” on a recommendation and from reading the reviews it seems the story provides background information on a couple of the characters from the series.

However, you don’t need to read the series to enjoy the story, which is the tale of Zara and Buzz: a romance that begs the caution, be careful what you ask for.

Zara and Buzz have a good thing going, but Buzz wants more. Will Zara give in and give him what he wants? Or would it be better if Buzz was satisfied with what he has?

I can’t say more without giving away the surprise ending. If romance is your thing, give this short story a try. You can find it on Amazon.

The Paranormal

Van Dyne’s Zuvembies is live! The seventh book in the Pierce Mostyn Paranormal Investigations series. And it is off to a good start.

Each Pierce Mostyn investigation is a stand alone story. So you can read Van Dyne’s Zuvembies today — and read the rest of the series later.

Interest in the paranormal is high, and paranormal fiction is hot.

But what is paranormal fiction? When I was kid, back in the 50s and 60s, there was no paranormal fiction: it was called occult or supernatural fiction. Sometime between then and now, those terms fell out of use in favor of paranormal.

To understand these 3 terms, let’s see what the Merriam-Webster dictionary says.

Occult (noun) — matters regarded as involving the action or influence of supernatural or supernormal powers or some secret knowledge of them; used with the

Supernatural 

1) of or relating to an order of existence beyond the visible observable universe

2a) departing from what is usual for normal, especially so as to appear to transcend the laws of nature

2b) attributed to an invisible agent (such as a ghost or spirit)

Paranormal — not scientifically explainable: supernatural

So we can see all of these terms basically mean something that is not within normal or natural experience.

Therefore it doesn’t really matter what we call the genre, because paranormal, supernatural, and occult fiction cover the same subjects: myth, fairy tales, legends, cryptids, ghosts, monsters, the fae, and the like.

Popular subgenres include: cosmic horror, the ghost story, the Gothic novel, werewolf and other shapeshifter fiction, vampire and zombie fiction, and the like.

The paranormal story has been with us for a very long time and down through the ages has been called many different things. But in the end, they all refer to the same class of story.

At base, the Pierce Mostyn books are cosmic horror set in HP Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos universe. However, I’m not averse to stepping outside the cosmic horror subgenre to give readers a taste of a different class of monster.

Horror stories generally operate either viscerally or intellectually.

Visceral horror is horror that focuses on an emotive reaction, often resorting to the gross out. This is the in-your-face blood and guts horror.

Intellectual horror appeals to the mind. It is usually subtle, and often challenges our understanding of how things ought to be by showing us how things actually are.

Intellectual horror flips aside the curtain; it is taking the red pill.

While there’s plenty of action in the Pierce Mostyn stories, I definitely strive for an intellectual horror approach. Because at the end of the day I think that type of story is truly terrifying.

Comments are always welcome! Until next time, happy reading!

Flawed Heroes: Bah! Humbug!

Pierce Mostyn rides again in 7 days! I’m looking forward to the release of Book 7 in the Pierce Mostyn Paranormal Investigations series. There’s nothing better than fighting monsters and bad guys and coming out on top.

The series is a combination of Cthulhu Mythos, creature feature, and action/adventure. And I have great fun writing the books. The series has also been my top seller since its introduction in 2018.

Lee Child wrote that he created Jack Reacher to be the opposite of the angst ridden and troubled main characters of detective and thriller fiction. He was tired of flawed characters. So Reacher doesn’t have any flaws. And because he’s the guy who beats up the playground bullies, he’s something of a superhero as well.

Quite accidentally, Mostyn is cut from the same cloth. Probably because the characters I enjoy most aren’t overly flawed. They might be quirky, but they don’t have flaws. Characters such as Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, Holmes and Watson, Solomon Kane, Jules de Grandin, Hercule Poirot, and Philip Marlowe.

Perhaps because I see my own flaws all too clearly, I want my fictional heroes to be flawless. Quirks are okay. Delightful in fact. But flaws? I can do without them. Give me a hero who is just a bit larger than life.

If you haven’t read Pierce Mostyn, give the series a try! The books are at Amazon, and free with Kindle Unlimited.

Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy reading!

Riffing on The X-Files

Since his debut in Nightmare In Agate Bay (January 2018), Pierce Mostyn and his paranormal investigations has been my bestselling series.

The genesis for the series was The X-Files. And while the overarching story arc of the TV series was about space aliens (a storyline very similar to the earlier TV series The Invaders), it was the “monster of the week” episodes that I found most interesting. I liked the concept of a government agent investigating those things that go bump in the night.

The biggest things that go bump in the night, IMO, are Cthulhu and his ilk. So it was only natural for me to mash up The X-Files concept with The Cthulhu Mythos, with the “monster of the week” idea finding its way into the sub-series with diabolical mastermind Valdis Damien van Dyne.

Van Dyne lets me play with the whole cryptid menagerie, much as the producers and writers did with The X-Files. Let’s face it — we like monsters. We like weird, paranormal critters and beings. And while the cosmic horror of Cthulhu and his fellow Old Ones is terrifying, there is nothing immediately scarier than a good old-fashioned monster. Hence, the perennial popularity of the “creature feature”.

On Monday, the 20th of July, you will be treated to a rare and unusual cryptid: the zuvembie. The creation of Robert E Howard, drawn from the spooky stories his grandmother told him. 

The zuvembie is a top-drawer creation, yet to my knowledge it only appeared once in the Howard oeuvre in the story “Pigeons from Hell”. I’m pleased that arch-villain Valdis Damien van Dyne learned the secret of the Black Brew and planned his zuvembie apocalypse. It will make COVID look like the common cold.

Make sure your hearing protection works, because you’re going to need it in two weeks.

Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy monster hunting!