Malasz

Imagine a future where orphan children are adopted by international corporations and forced into indentured servitude, where zombie viruses are spread through heterosexual intercourse, where Osama bin Laden is cloned by the thousands for public execution. Welcome to the world of JUSTICE, INC. No one is safe. Nothing is sacred. And all sales are final. Justice, Inc. is a collection of short stories written by Dale Bridges and published by Monkey Puzzle Press . It is due to be released on June 20th. All in all, this is a solid collection of 21st century American satire. "In the Beginning: An Introduction" sets the tone for the collection with Bridges explaining how he came to write these stories. If it's divine inspiration, there's certainly a bit of playful smirking—and possibly spirits—involved. There are bits of flash fiction that serve as appetizers for the normal length stories. While "Texting the Apocalypse" doesn't have any direct links to "...

Chained by Fear , book two in Jim Melvin’s Death Wizard Chronicles , begins the story of Laylah, the beautiful sister of the evil sorcerer Invictus.   Invictus has imprisoned Laylah in a magical tower, hoping that she’ll one day become his queen and rule the world of Triken with him.   Laylah, however, happens to be the sane one in the family.   She’s repulsed at the thought of marrying her own brother, let alone spending her life with a depraved lunatic with god-like powers.   She’s locked away for seventy years—her demon blood gives her long life—before finally escaping with the help of Invictus’s former allies. While on the run, she meets Torg the Death-Knower, a powerful wizard in his own right.   We last saw Torg in Forged in Death , after he had escaped Invictus’s vile prison and made some roguish friends.   When Laylah and Torg meet, sparks fly.   Literally.   They are drawn to each other in a supernatural passion that neither can explain. ...

This Saturday, November 23rd, is the first Nutmeg Book Festival in New Milford, CT. The NPRoB's own David Drazul will be one of twenty indie and small press authors gathered together to meet the public and hopefully interest some of them in their work. Please visit the website for more information including location, author roster, and genres covered. While there are gatherings of this nature all over the world, if you're an indie author or small press whose work has been featured here on the blog and you're participating in a similar event, let us know and we'll throw a shout out here on the blog and Google+.

We received an email from Midwestern Gothic , the publisher of independent novel award winner This Jealous Earth , that they're going to give copies of the book away in a Twitter contest. Here's the email we received: Hello! Just wanted to pass along a little nugget of This Jealous Earth news that we'd love to offer up to your followers - next week ( Jan 28 - Feb 1 ), we're going to be putting on a Twitter contest. We'll be giving away a signed copy of the book as well as 5 eBooks. All folks need to do is RT the contest tweet from the @mwgothic Twitter account. We'd love it if you shared this with your Twitter followers next week or RT'd the contest tweet at some point. I've included a link to our contest announcement with more information. http://midwestgothic.com/2013/01/this-jealous-earth-twitter-book-giveaway/ If you have any questions or need any more info, let us know! Thanks! Jeff I don't know if we need to bother with a legal disclaimer, bu...

Forged in Death , the first of six books in Jim Melvin's Death Wizard Chronicles, starts out with a scene from a claustrophobic's nightmare – Torg, the Death-Knower and king of the Tugars, is imprisoned by the evil wizard Invictus at the bottom of a cold, dark pit bored hundreds of feet into a mountain. He can't stretch out because the pit is too small, and he can't lean against the walls, because they're enchanted with flesh-burning magic. He either has to stand or curl into an uncomfortably tight fetal position. We're only in the prologue, and the book is already giving me the willies. And that's a good thing. Torg eventually escapes the pit and embarks on an Odyssey-like journey back to his desert home to stop Invictus from enslaving the world of Triken. Jim Melvin's world-building was at once fantastic and logical, from the unique human cultures to the strange twists on traditional monsters. It's obvious Melvin put a lot of thought into the...

This Jealous Earth by Scott Dominic Carpenter. Midwestern Gothic Press. It is interesting that one of these sharply written short stories, “The Spirit of the Dog,” takes place in a uranium mine. Instead of looking for sparkly bits of gold, the miners run around with Geiger counters after a preliminary blast, looking for little bursts of radiation. Most of these stories involve connections: their breaking, their forming, their resilience, their failure. Just as the forces binding particles in the atomic nucleus are enormously strong, many of the characters in these pieces are drawn, despite themselves, to their imperfect families, to their treasured pets. The opposite occurs in “The Spirit of the Dog”; the various miners pit themselves against the new, pretty engineer. Their individual stubborn egos form a sort of misogynist hive mind whose evil ideas drive everyone apart. The egos of squabbling or drunk parents get in the way, but their kids band together for mischief or otherwise st...