Black Forest Protocol
In Black Forest Protocol, author Clifton Wilcox drops a UFO crash into Nazi Germany and uses that collision to build a dark, morally charged speculative thriller: SS officer Ernst Falk witnesses an alien arrival in the Black Forest, discovers that the survivors are not invaders but vulnerable pilgrims, and slowly turns from functionary to witness as the Reich tries to convert wonder into doctrine, biology into propaganda, and contact into domination. The novel eventually broadens beyond the 1930s crash into a longer historical reckoning, revealing that what the Nazis tried to weaponize was never meant as a tool of conquest at all, but as a system of preservation and balance.
I enjoyed the book’s atmosphere. Wilcox gives the forest a living pressure, and the opening movement has a genuine eldritch shimmer to it: the silence feels predatory, the ship feels less manufactured than grown, and the aliens arrive with a sadness that keeps the novel from sliding into pulp. I was especially taken with Falk as a protagonist. He’s not built as a swaggering resistor; he is a cautious, thinking man whose decency emerges by increments, which made his bond with the surviving alien feel more persuasive than a louder, more cinematic version would have. When the book is operating in that register, cosmic mystery filtered through dread, pity, and moral nausea, it has real voltage.
The novel is at its strongest when it lets horror and conscience share the same room. The most unsettling passages are not the extraterrestrial ones, but the scenes where Nazi ideology tries to metabolize the unknown into its own diseased mythology. That is the book’s sharpest idea: not simply that evil destroys, but that it narrates, repackages, and aestheticizes destruction until it sounds inevitable. I also found the prose interestingly uneven, and I mean that as praise because it can be a touch overwrought, but it is rarely inert. Wilcox reaches, sometimes flamboyantly, for a language of omen and scar tissue, and I’d rather read a book that risks a little melodrama than one that settles for sterile competence.
I’d recommend Black Forest Protocol to readers of historical science fiction, alternate-history suspense, UFO fiction, first-contact horror, and conspiracy thrillers with a moral spine. Readers who like the historical unease of Philip Kerr’s wartime settings, or the idea-driven speculative pressure of Philip K. Dick, will probably find something to grab onto here, though Wilcox is more earnest than either and more openly allegorical. For the right audience, this is a grim, curious, haunted book about what happens when wonder falls into the wrong hands. When the stars finally spoke, the worst men on Earth tried to translate them into power.
Pages: 394 | ISBN: 1969770090
Shiloh – An Act of Compassion Becomes a Prelude to Madness
The story begins with Sam Henderson, a quiet paramedic living in the remote forests of northern Idaho. One night, he discovers a wounded wolf on his porch and uses his medical skills to save it. By morning, the wolf is gone, and in its place stands a mysterious and stunning woman named Shiloh, bearing the same wound. What follows is a haunting blend of myth, romance, and psychological unease. The book steadily unfolds a strange world where compassion collides with the supernatural, exploring the blurred lines between man, nature, and the monstrous.
The writing is vivid and unhurried, striking in how it paints the forests, the silence, and Sam’s isolation. The tone is eerie, yet tender. I could feel Sam’s confusion and curiosity, his logical mind struggling to comprehend what stood before him. The authors have a way of turning quiet moments into something tense and electric. At times, though, the dialogue feels old-fashioned or a bit heavy-handed, like a stage play where everyone speaks too carefully. Still, the emotional honesty pulls it through. I found myself caring deeply for Shiloh, even when her story turned darker and more complex.
What struck me most was the mix of compassion and madness. The book digs into loneliness, faith, and what it means to help someone, or something, you don’t understand. Sam’s empathy is both his strength and his undoing. There’s a sadness beneath it all, the kind that lingers. The supernatural angle, tied to ancient curses and human cruelty, feels oddly believable because the emotions ring true. It’s not a horror novel exactly, but it unsettled me in the quietest ways.
I’d recommend Shiloh to readers who like stories that mix realism with myth, who enjoy character-driven suspense more than fast-paced thrillers. It’s for anyone who’s ever felt the tug between logic and instinct, love and fear. Shiloh reminded me of The Shape of Water by Guillermo del Toro, with its mix of tenderness and unease, where love brushes up against the strange and the boundaries between human and creature begin to blur.
Pages: 126 | ASIN : B0GTMBH4HK
Tom Ryan’s Shoes
T.A. Keenan’s Tom Ryan’s Shoes is a famine tale told as family legend, with one foot in hard history and the other in Irish folklore. The book opens in 1933 Connecticut, where an old manuscript tucked inside a pair of shoes brings an 1846 story back to life. From there, it turns into a road story, a courtship story, and a ghost-tinged inheritance story all at once. What gives it shape is the sense that memory itself is part of the plot. This is a book about how families carry things forward: land, grief, jokes, warnings, and stories polished by retelling.
What I liked most is the way Keenan lets the famine stay present without reducing every scene to misery. Tom and Frank move through a countryside full of hunger, cruelty, and fear, but the novel keeps making room for talk, oddball humor, local characters, and flashes of generosity. That balance matters. It gives the book motion and humanity. The pig Toto is a smart touch too. She could have been a gimmick, but instead, she helps keep the story earthy and lively, which suits a novel so interested in survival at the level of the body.
The strongest thread running through the book is its belief that folklore and practical life belong together. The bean feasa, the raven, the little men, and the story of Lady Edith all deepen the novel rather than floating above it as decoration. Keenan uses the uncanny to talk about care, justice, and obligation. One of the book’s best lines is, “Farewell! May you never wear a soldier’s buttons.” That lands as both blessing and warning, and it captures the novel’s moral core better than a speech ever could.
The prose has a storyteller’s ease. It likes voices, side characters, and scenes that feel as if they were meant to be read aloud near a fire. Sometimes that means the book wanders a bit, or leans into anecdotal charm more than momentum, but even then it stays readable because the voice is so enjoyable. I also liked that the ending doesn’t just wrap up a romance. It circles back to storytelling itself, and to the way embellishment becomes part of family truth. When Quill says, “never let the truth get in the way of a good story,” I felt like the book is smiling at you and admitting exactly how it works.
This is an affectionate and imaginative historical novella that treats Irish memory as something lived, argued over, and handed down. It’s interested in courtship, class, famine, faith, and the strange half-magic logic of oral tradition. More than anything, it feels made by someone who wants these people, and this inheritance, to remain vivid. I came away thinking less about plot twists than about atmosphere and lineage: worn shoes, old roads, family voices, and the stubborn desire to keep going.
Pages: 132 | ASIN: B0GRV2NV9D
Making the Concept Work
First Step centers around the first human to step onto an alien planet and the Spacefirst AI investigating how another AI has veered dangerously off course. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The stories of Eve and Ray originally started in my mind as two separate books. In the epilogue to First, the book prior to First Step, there’s a line in the epilogue where the narrator says Eve becomes the first person to step onto a planet outside our solar system, but that’s her story to tell. This is that story. I wish I could say writing it went smoothly, but I had several false starts. I wrote myself into corners, bored myself with my own storyline, and probably ended up wasting 40k words before I found a setup for Eve that worked. As for Ray and his story, I knew after First that he’d make a great narrator, and it’d be fun to write a book from the perspective of an AI. Just as with Eve’s story, I spun my wheels making the concept work on its own. The lightbulb went off at some point, and I realized combining the two stories with alternating narrators would make for a really good book. From there, I kept it simple with Eve and Ray trading narrative duties each chapter.
Did Eve’s journey or Ray’s voice come to you first?
It’d be nice to say Eve’s journey came first, but I have to be honest and say Ray’s voice. I wrote him as a sarcastic and funny AI in First, and scripting his words came to me easily since I think and communicate likewise. I worked through several iterations of Eve’s journey and at one point had her adrift on an ocean for weeks. Strangely enough, that didn’t work too well for me as the author, and if I’m bored, the reader’s going to be bored. My main intent for Eve’s journey was to be a struggle for survival, and how she overcame that and changed as a result. I think I found ways to make that happen and keep the reader engaged. Regarding Ray’s voice, I actually had to tone it down in several spots. There’s a point where his humor can cross the line and become annoying. For instance, he uses avatars of pop-culture icons when he speaks on the phone with one of the book’s antagonists. I cut out a couple of those interactions and edited others so those scenes didn’t overwhelm the book and become an instance of, “What? Another avatar? This is getting old.” In both Eve’s and Ray’s narratives, I hope I found the right balance.
The conflict between Ray and Ares raises questions about how AI evolves. What interested you most about that dynamic?
It’s a very important question about AI that we’re dealing with on almost a daily basis. The most interesting thing to me about the evolution of Ray versus Ares is that it’s very human. Early in the book, the question comes up about how and why AIs react to the same situation in different ways, which is exactly what humans do. In one simple example, a person wins a contest. One friend feels happy for the winner, while another friend feels jealous. In my story, AIs write and expand their own source code on the fly as they deal with different situations, so going back to the example, one AI writes a subroutine that allows them to celebrate their friend, while the other creates programming about bitterness, which may lead to revenge, etc. We already see the major players in AI coming up with different answers and approaches to the questions they’re asked, a sign they’re evolving independently. Just like humans.
Can we look forward to a follow-up to First Step?
I’d love to write another book with these characters, and I just need to come up with a good reason to inflict it on the world. The ending leaves the tiniest of hints that there’s another story out there. I’m letting the seed of that idea rest, and it’ll sprout when it’s ready. In the meantime, I’m working on a series about a survival contest on unexplored alien planets called The Drop. The first two seasons have been published, and I’m writing the fourth in what I plan to be at least ten books. I can certainly see myself taking a break at some point from that series and writing another book to follow First and First Step. I’ve been humbled and happy that people have responded so favorably to the stories and characters, and I’d be happy to visit that fictional universe again.
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Facebook | Website | Amazon
Eve becomes the first person to ever set foot on an alien planet, a pioneering move for humanity. It all goes sideways in a heartbeat and Eve quickly finds herself in a struggle for survival on Primis, a planet that seems intent on killing her. A triumphant achievement for SpaceFirst and her fellow astronauts accelerates into a race against time, predators, and the elements.
Back on Earth, Ray is the SpaceFirst AI tasked with determining who is trying to sabotage the company and why. Ray encounters his nemesis, Ares, and the two become entangled in a high-stakes conflict of deception and willpower. Ray’s detective work uncovers a web of conspiracy, including powerful politicians and a rogue environmental group, that want to monopolize the galaxy’s future colonization for their own profit. Ray must fight both real and artificial battles not just for SpaceFirst’s survival, but his own as well.
Eve and Ray, astronaut and AI – intense struggles light years apart that will determine mankind’s future.
Unseen Adversaries
Fade to Blue follows an Alzheimer’s researcher who is being hunted and manipulated after accidentally creating a drug that can almost instantly wipe out all brain activity. Where did the idea for this novel come from?
In 1998, I was working at a steel mill. One evening during a break, a coworker suggested we write a short story together. While considering ideas, I remembered that an annealing line had crashed because a computer controlling its speed and torque had lost all Random-access memory. I said, “How about this: a scientist creates a drug that can erase a human’s memory.”
How much research went into the neuroscience and Alzheimer’s elements of the story?
My father was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease when I began writing Fade to Blue. That had a huge impact on me and the story.
Regarding the research, neuroscientist Dr. Brian Cummings invited me to his UC Irvine laboratory, where I saw firsthand the experiments and brain research being done by his students. The Memory Research Institute depicted in Fade to Blue is the result of my visit to UC Irvine. And it was Dr. Cummings who explained how a brain-destroying drug like T-3 could be created.
I later went to New York City at the invitation of Dr. Bernardo Rudy, head of the Rudy Lab at NYU Department of Neuroscience, to get a tour of his laboratory and discuss the science in my book.
The novel builds tension through small, everyday moments—driving, showering, simply being alone. Why was it important to show fear in those ordinary situations?
I wanted to infuse fear into normally mundane aspects of Sarah’s life so a reader could identify. We all drive a car and receive phone calls from friends. Those events shouldn’t stoke fear or panic. They do in Fade to Blue because unknown and unseen adversaries are following Sarah’s every move and listening to her every sound. This fear is omnipresent, but she must maintain a happy façade and keep her friends in the dark. At the same time, she channels her fear into courage, cunning, and resolve.
What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available?
Unfortunately, I’m not planning to write more books at this time. It took me 25 years to write Fade to Blue.
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
Sarah Brenalen, a frustrated researcher, secretly tests experimental Alzheimer’s drugs, only to create a brain-destroying compound. Marcel, an international operative, sees its potential.
Fade to Blue plunges you into a high-stakes cat-and-mouse game. Is Sarah a pawn, or can she outwit Marcel and prevent global catastrophe?
Uncover a dark conspiracy
Experience a fast-paced thriller
Explore the ethics of scientific discovery
For fans of Robin Cook and Michael Crichton, this medical thriller blends cutting-edge science with heart-stopping suspense.
Expectation Underneath the Emotion
In The Reset Self, you help readers understand how early family dynamics, social pressures, and constant performance create resentment, anxiety, and burnout. Why was this an important book for you to write?
I wrote this book because I kept seeing the same pattern over and over again, in myself and in other people. Smart, capable, self-aware individuals who were doing everything “right,” but still felt exhausted, resentful, or quietly disconnected from their own lives.
The common thread wasn’t a lack of effort or insight. It was that they were trying to improve a version of themselves that was never really theirs to begin with.
Most of us are living in roles we learned early on, roles that helped us stay safe, be accepted, or be loved. But those roles don’t disappear when we grow up. They just get more sophisticated. And eventually, they start to cost us.
This book exists because I wanted to offer something different. Not another way to fix yourself, but a way to question who is doing the fixing in the first place.
You make a distinction between the “role-self” and the real person. How did you come to recognize that difference in your own life or work?
It didn’t happen all at once. It was more of a slow realization that the way I was showing up in different areas of my life felt… consistent, but not necessarily true.
I could see how my reactions were patterned. Predictable. Almost scripted. Especially in moments of stress or conflict. And when I looked closer, those patterns always traced back to something learned, not something chosen.
That’s when the distinction became clear. There’s the version of you that was built through conditioning, through expectations, roles, and adaptation. And then there’s something underneath that, something quieter but more stable.
The “role-self” reacts automatically. The real person has choice.
Once you see that difference, even briefly, you can’t unsee it. And that’s where real change starts.
Of all the tools you introduce, which one tends to create the biggest shift for readers when they try it?
The biggest shift usually comes from something very simple: recognizing the expectation underneath the emotion.
Most people think they’re reacting to what happened. But they’re actually reacting to what they believed should have happened.
When someone starts catching that in real time, “What did I expect here?” everything changes. Because suddenly the reaction makes sense. It’s not random. It’s not a personality flaw. It’s a script being broken.
That moment creates space. And once there’s space, there’s choice.
It’s subtle, but it’s one of the most powerful shifts in the entire process.
What is one thing you hope readers take away from The Reset Self?
That they are not broken.
Not in a surface-level, reassuring way, but in a very literal sense. The exhaustion, the anxiety, the resentment, it’s not evidence of something wrong with them. It’s evidence of something learned that no longer fits.
If someone can walk away with that and start questioning the roles they’ve been living inside of instead of trying to perfect them, then the book has done its job.
Because from that point on, they’re no longer trying to fix themselves. They’re starting to come back to themselves.
Author Links: GoodReads | Website | Amazon
You don’t need a better self. You need freedom from the one you were trained to be.
Most people spend their entire lives feeling lost, anxious, overwhelmed, or painfully disconnected from themselves, not because something is wrong with them, but because they’ve been living inside a conditioned identity that never truly belonged to them.
The roles you learned in childhood, the Good One, the High-Achiever, the Strong One, the Fixer, the Peacemaker, helped you survive, but now they keep you stuck in cycles of self-sabotage, people-pleasing, perfectionism, overthinking, emotional trauma patterns, anxiety, and self-doubt. These roles shape your decisions, your relationships, your boundaries, and even your sense of purpose.
The Reset Self introduces a revolutionary perspective: You’re not failing to “find inner peace,” “love yourself again,” or “discover your purpose in life.” You simply can’t build a peaceful life on top of a self that isn’t actually yours.
Inside this book, you’ll learn how to:Recognize the hidden conditioning behind feeling lost in life and not knowing who you really are.
Identify the role-based patterns fueling your anxiety, overthinking, emotional exhaustion, and resentment.
Break cycles of self-sabotage and negative thinking without forcing yourself into toxic positivity.
Heal emotional trauma, including toxic childhood conditioning, through nervous-system based practices that work in real life.
Use the Fingertips Principle to stop trying to control what was never yours to manage.
Run Non-Compliance Experiments that retrain your nervous system to feel safe when you stop over-giving and start choosing yourself.
Untangle your sense of purpose from expectations, guilt, or external validation.
Feel emotions without feeding them or turning them into spirals of overthinking and fear.
And for the first time, this edition includes a new and urgent topic: The Social Media Self — how comparison, unrealistic standards, curated “perfect lives,” and constant performance pressure distort your identity and steal your peace. Learn how to reset the part of you that feels behind, invisible, or never enough.
This book is not another mindset hack, manifestation trick, or habit-building routine. It’s a practical, grounded, psychologically-informed method for stepping out of the identity you were conditioned into, and returning to the person underneath.
Perfect for Readers Who Feel:“I feel lost in life and don’t know who I am anymore.”
“I want to find myself again after years of overthinking, people-pleasing, or burnout.”
“I want to heal emotional trauma, anxiety, or self-doubt without endlessly reliving the past.”
“I want inner peace, but I don’t know how to get there.”
“I’m tired of performing. I want to feel real again.”
The Reset Self is a guide for anyone ready to stop performing a life they never chose, and finally live the one that is actually theirs.
If you’re exhausted from healing, striving, or trying to be “enough,” this book will show you the way home to yourself.
I Am Incapable (And That’s Okay): 100+ Disappointing Affirmations for Embracing the Bare Minimum
There is no shortage of books designed to inspire readers toward greatness. Some focus on business success. Others offer broader motivation, urging you to embrace ambition, discipline, and relentless self-improvement. That kind of guidance can be valuable, even transformative. Still, not every reader is in the mood for optimism wrapped in instruction, especially during moments of deep cynicism. And in a world that often gives people plenty of reasons to feel worn down, doubtful, or simply unequal to the task of living at full throttle, a book like this may feel far more honest. Rather than insisting on excellence, it offers a collection of sayings and lessons that suggest failure is not only acceptable, but sometimes oddly appealing.
I Am Incapable (And That’s Okay): 100+ Disappointing Affirmations for Embracing the Bare Minimum by S.B. Collective is a sharply humorous antidote to the flood of conventional self-help titles crowding bookstore shelves and digital storefronts alike. Books built on positive affirmations and self-improvement are everywhere. That does not mean they lack merit. Many of them genuinely resonate, particularly with readers drawn to productivity, achievement, and the culture of optimization. They speak to the Type A crowd, the people of power lunches, morning routines, and wellness cleanses. This book speaks to someone else entirely. It belongs to the opposite camp, the ones drifting through the day in pajamas and feeling no particular need to apologize for it.
With dry wit and an unapologetically pessimistic edge, this book gleefully overturns the conventions of the self-help genre. It will not appeal to everyone. For some readers, the very notion of embracing the bare minimum will feel almost offensive. Even so, one could argue that modern life gives cynicism a strong foundation. For anyone who has ever felt exhausted by the pressure to optimize, improve, and perform, this book may strike exactly the right chord. Its many clever lessons offer more than humor. They deliver a strange kind of reassurance, affirming that failure is not merely survivable. In some cases, it may even be preferable to trying at all.
In the end, I Am Incapable (And That’s Okay) stands out as a funny, unconventional alternative to traditional self-help, offering comfort and humor to readers who are tired of constant pressure to succeed. For the cynical or exhausted, it may be exactly the right book at the right time.
Page: 106 | ASIN : B0GPT42H59
Destiny and Other Follies
Gregory Venters’s Destiny and Other Follies is a work of literary fiction, with a strong philosophical streak, about Calder Brandt, a midlife consultant whose career ambition is colliding with the long aftershocks of throat cancer, and about his wife Hana, whose loneliness, memory, and restlessness give the novel its second pulse. Set against corporate maneuvering, marriage strain, and the eerie approach of the pandemic, the book follows two people who are still living side by side but are no longer fully meeting each other where it counts. That setup sounds cold on paper. In practice, it is much more intimate and bruising than that.
Venters can describe a medical exam, a business meeting, a taxi ride, or a quiet argument at breakfast with the same level of pressure and attention, and that gives the novel a strange, impressive consistency. Nothing is treated as small if it matters to the characters. I liked that. At times, I also felt the prose leaning so hard into description and analogy that it risked slowing the story’s momentum, but even then, I could feel the intent behind it. This is a novel deeply interested in how thought works, how humiliation lingers, how a body can become part prison and part warning. Calder’s damaged voice and failing neck are not just plot details. They become part of the book’s whole emotional weather.
I also liked that the novel does not make corporate life easy to mock from a distance. It would have been simple to turn the consulting world into a flat target, but Venters gives it texture and menace and, oddly enough, a kind of tragic absurdity. The office politics, branding language, partner rituals, and petty betrayals feel painfully lived in, while Hana’s sections widen the book and keep it from becoming only Calder’s private storm. Her perspective mattered to me a lot. It adds memory, migration, grief, and a sharper social awareness, and it keeps reminding us that ambition is never a solo event because somebody else is always paying for it too. By the time the novel reaches its pandemic-shadowed final stretch, with isolation becoming literal as well as emotional, it feels less like a book about career disappointment and more like a book about the stories people build just to keep moving.
In the end, I found Destiny and Other Follies serious, searching, and quietly affecting. It asks for patience, and it is not the kind of literary fiction that hurries to charm you, but I think that resistance is part of its character. I would recommend it most to readers who like reflective, psychologically detailed novels, especially literary fiction that cares as much about inner erosion as outward plot, and to anyone interested in books about marriage, illness, work, and the humiliations of modern professional life. Readers willing to sit with discomfort, irony, and long emotional echoes will find a lot here.
Pages: 362 | ASIN : B0GNP6BGFK
