Malasz

Grab a comfy chair by the fire, a hot drink, and a book of good horror stories.  Those rattling shutters outside?  Just the blowing snow.  Those shadows dancing in the corner?  Fire light, nothing more.  And the whispers behind your chair are your imagination. Maybe. That’s the feeling Mark Fuller Dillon conveys throughout his short story collection In a Season of Dead Weather . In most of the stories, it was never quite clear whether the “horror” was in the narrator’s mind or if it was real. The reader was left to interpret at the end. And that worked for me. Each Lovecraftian tale was expertly crafted, with poetic and visceral language describing characters enduring the loneliness and isolation of a long winter in the country or the city. Dillon is a Quebec native, so he’s no stranger to maddeningly endless winters (I’m a west Michigan native, so I can sympathize). Most of the stories were quite literary and a little confusing to me, a genre reader. But t...

Legend has it that Shakespeare's play, Macbeth , is cursed . As such, the superstitious who work on the play will refer (and insist others do the same) to it as "The Scottish Play". Many have speculated as to the reason, but Harry Greenville writes a novel with his own explanation: the Bard stole the idea from someone else. Shakespeare's victim then sets out to exact revenge through sabotage. Greenville, an aspiring actor living in L.A., makes the mistake of uploading it to a website where it is pilfered. When Greenville learns that his story is being made into a movie, he sets out to exact revenge of his own. There's such a superb attention to detail here that I would swear that Collis worked on a movie set at one point in his life or he performed a mind meld with someone who did. Collis introduces us to the boredom of limo drivers, the humiliating subservience of runners, the brown nosing of the wannabes, and the egos of Hollywood's lords. But at no point d...

It has been a long standing tradition of independent publishing that lousy book covers were the norm. So many authors shunned investing any money in their covers that they doomed themselves to ridicule (at best) or obscurity. While it might not necessarily be prudent to judge a book by its cover, all too often it was a safe bet that a crappy cover meant crappy writing. Potential readers chuckled and moved on. In defense of the mass of indie authors who chose low quality covers, the big stumbling block to a quality cover was price. Spending five hundred to a thousand dollars on a cover for a book that would be exceptionally lucky to earn $100 for the author was an investment most chose not to make. When I scored a cover for my novel for $200, I was psyched. But I'm here to tell you today that everyone can have a professional looking cover for $200 or even much less. I was relating my tale of book cover design woe (which I'll share in a later post) with my friend and fellow ind...

Greetings, fellow bibliophiles! Today I have the pleasure of introducing you all to Mike Gullickson, author of The Northern Star:  The Beginning. Erin aka The Bookworm: "Thank you for agreeing to do this interview! First, Tell us about what inspired the story?" Mike Gullickson: “A lot of my novels start with images that pop in my head. I wish I could draw. My mom insists I can, but she’s referencing dinosaurs from 4th grade and that’s when I peaked. For The Northern Star , I distinctly remember when it came into existence. It occurred about ten years ago while I was listening to Radiohead’s “I Might Be Wrong.” There’s a line in the song: There is no future left at all/That I know (I checked. It’s actually “There is no future left at all/That I think,” but it’s too late to go back, I heard “that I know” for the last decade.) And that line haunted me with imagery that became The Northern Star . The story changed significantly since those first images, but that’s how it began...

el·lip·sis – noun \i-ˈlip-səs, e-\ a : the omission of one or more words that are obviously understood but that must be supplied to make a construction grammatically complete;  b : a sudden leap from one topic to another : marks or a mark (as …) indicating an omission (as of words) or a pause The above definition is taken from the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. Since I’ve begun to read indie author works, I’ve noticed that writers seem to be in love with these three little dots. So much so that they misuse them all the time. At first, I thought it was just one book or author but after ten plus books where 75% of them misuse the ellipsis, I feel the need to step in. The main use of an ellipsis is to shorten a quotation or to show a trailing off in speech. Here is an example of each. For the quotation, let’s take a simple quote from Cicero: Original – “A friend is, as it were, a second self.” Ellipsisfied – “A friend is... a second self.” Notice that is replaces an unnecessary po...

Quinn Bolcan is a small-time ex-criminal who has the ability to drain energy from things, be they physical or magical. This talent proves to be beneficial (defusing bombs) and deadly (body heat loss can lead to frostbite). When the story opens, Quinn is unaware of his ability but, over the course of the novel, learns how to control it. Needing to get out of town (Vancouver) after a pot farm raid, he takes on the role of courier. His lawyer has a package that needs to be delivered to Montreal and it "isn't the kind you want to send by Fedex." While the story could've been about Quinn's cross-country trip (Canada is big and interesting enough), Stiles only details two stops: a bar in the Rockies where Quinn has a run-in with a supernatural biker gang and the delivery of the package in Montreal. They do factor into the novel later on though. The real action happens across the border in Vermont where Quinn accidentally defuses a nuke. The rest of the novel covers Qu...

Reviewed by Erin The year is 2058. The great oil shortage that we have been warned about since the 1970s has finally come to pass, causing the Great Migration, where people began moving from the suburbs and back into the cities. Enter Cynthia Revo who successfully frees the mind from its physical prison. People now live more in cyberspace than in reality. But it is much more than that. Cyberspace is now the new reality. It has become necessary for almost every aspect of society. The economies of countries depend on it. But no one suspects the evil that lurks around the next cyber corner. At first glance, I was prepared to dislike this book. I feared it was going to be a preachy environmental tale hidden behind a story that was part pre- Matrix , part Mechwarrior , and part Ender’s Game . I was delightfully surprised. I was treated to an old school science-fiction romp. The characters are complex creations that grow and evolve throughout the story which, at its core, is a morality tale....