Moving Forward
Vacancy follows a widowed teacher, a mother trapped in an abusive relationship, and the people around them as tragedy, misunderstanding, and compassion collide in a struggling Texas Panhandle town. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
In 2005, two articles on the front page of a major newspaper’s Metro section jumped out. One story was joyful, the other horrific, and the characters in each were unrelated. But I was inspired to meld them together into one novel, to explore the complexities of each situation. I chose the Texas Panhandle setting for its small-town environment, where scenarios of second chances, and tragedies nobody saw coming, were believable.
Helen’s concern for Jillie is compassionate but also complicated by grief, regret, and longing. What interested you about exploring the line between helping someone and imposing your own needs on them?
It’s human nature to want to help people in trouble, and often that “help” comes in the form of advice and worse. I’ve seen well-intentioned people try to make up for what they lack, by forcing what they need on a more troubled person, in the guise of help. I like to explore what motivates people to do what they do, and that theme is an especially ripe one to untangle.
Hartless and the Jack of Diamonds motel feel almost like characters themselves. What did the Texas Panhandle setting allow you to express about isolation, hardship, and renewal?
The Texas Panhandle has a wide span of treeless land broken by cactus, mesquite, tumbleweeds, and an endless sky. That can make you feel very small. In-between towns, you’ll travel for miles on cracked two-lane roads and be lucky to see another pickup pass by. Again, that can make you feel very alone. That kind of terrain implies isolation and hardship just by its geographical features and distances. And then you’ll be rewarded with the most glorious, colorful sunsets, that go on forever, that can make you feel reborn.
The novel offers hope without suggesting that grief, abuse, or trauma can simply be erased. What did you most want readers to understand about forgiveness, accountability, and rebuilding a life?
People who suffer abuse and trauma don’t let go of it easily, and may be affected by it still, years later. Like the characters in Vacancy, in real life people learn there’s no way out, it’s just a long irregular journey where moving forward, despite the pain, is the only place to go.
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Helen is childless and widowed after a long marriage, and gets a second chance with a long lost love. But she’s grieving her hidden regrets. She bonds with her quiet kindergarten student, and doubts the girl’s struggling single mother, Charlene, is fit to parent.
Charlene’s hiding a secret of her own, and she resents Helen’s interference. She’s determined to make a better life for her young daughter, the teenage boy her ex left behind, and the baby on the way, when a scarred veteran offers to lend a hand.
A tragedy no one sees coming forces the two women to unite, as small-town bias threatens to destroy innocent lives. But first, Helen and Charlene must confront the vacancy in their hearts, to find newfound strength, acceptance, and a second chance at love.
Based on a true story.
Queer Justice
Alex Charns’s Queer Justice is a historical legal novel built around a startling question buried in the FBI’s own files: did J. Edgar Hoover use an allegation about Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas’s sex life to gain leverage over one of the most powerful judges in America? Charns takes that documented history and turns it into a story about secrecy, fear, loyalty, ambition, and the enormous power institutions possess when prejudice itself becomes a weapon. Beginning in 1966, the novel moves among Fortas, Hoover, the FBI, the Supreme Court, and a young defense lawyer named Mitch “Puck” Pilsudski, whose teenage client George “Sweet” Smith claims he had a sexual relationship with Fortas. What follows is part courtroom story, part political thriller, and part excavation of a period when being labeled homosexual could destroy a career before anyone bothered asking whether an accusation was true.
The novel is at its most engaging when that large historical machinery collides with the lives of ordinary people. Puck is still figuring out how to practice law when he finds himself brushing against the White House, the Supreme Court, FBI surveillance, antiwar protests, and secrets nobody wants exposed. Around him, Charns creates a memorable circle that includes investigator and gay rights activist Cake, Fortas law clerk Max Lieberman, and Puck’s sharp-witted partner Adela. Through Cake and Max in particular, the political becomes personal. Gay men aren’t simply subjects in an FBI file here. They fall in love, build friendships, go dancing, practice law, challenge authority, and imagine lives that the culture around them insists they shouldn’t be allowed to have. Those scenes give the book warmth and humor while making the government’s obsession with policing sexuality feel even more invasive.
Charns also does something unusual with the shape of the story. After spending most of the novel inside the upheavals of the 1960s, he jumps forward to 2016 and then 2021, when Puck’s son, Mitch Jr., begins digging through the surviving record. The shift turns Queer Justice into a story about the pursuit of history as much as history itself. Testimony changes. Memories become suspect. FBI files appear, disappear, and contradict earlier accounts. Junior’s own experience as a gay man adds another layer to his investigation, connecting the fear surrounding sexuality in his father’s generation with a later generation that can live more openly while still carrying some of the old silences. By the time hidden records finally surface, the question has grown larger than what happened between two men in a hotel room. It’s about who gets to create the official version of events, how long institutions can conceal what they’ve done, and what it costs to keep asking for the truth.
That tension between documented fact and informed imagination is what gives Queer Justice its distinctive character. Charns has spent decades pursuing FBI records through Freedom of Information Act requests and litigation, and the novel draws openly on that work, even concluding with actual documents and an account of the author’s long struggle to obtain them. Yet the history never stays trapped in an archive. It becomes a human story about lawyers and lovers, frightened teenagers and compromised judges, friendship and conscience, and the strange ways truth can survive the people who tried to bury it. Queer Justice turns the secrets of the powerful into a deeply human story about the people who lived in their shadow, and the truth that refused to stay buried.
Pages: 195 | ASIN: B0GFD82TFS
To Tell a Story
Out of the Water follows a prince who doubts his worth and must uncover the secrets of his bloodline and three magical rings as a growing conflict threatens the kingdoms of earth, water, and fire. What is the most rewarding aspect of writing a series?
To tell a story. Show how, through fictitious characters, people can change, and not always for the better. Choices bare consequences. Out of the Water is an excellent example of just that. You can learn what not to do when writing characters similar to Svaryur and Drifa.
How did you develop the Einns and the rules surrounding their magical powers?
Einn in Icelandic means one. The residents in Huldar usually only have one Einn. That’s where it started, with one magical power progressing into three separate Einns. Fire, Water, and Joro (in Old Norse for earth). Fire comes from the heart, Water from the mind, and Joro from the lungs. Einns have limits.
Svaryur’s character changes significantly throughout the novel. At what point did you realize how dark his transformation would become?
When he would use his own son in Into the Fire to get what Drifa wanted.
Svaryur never really did what he wanted, only Drifa.
Can you give us a glimpse into the next installment of The Huldar Chronicles? Where will it take readers?
The final Chronicle, End of Joro, is the ending. Aron’s great- grandson, Hakon has taken the stage. He will take readers on a journey of Hope. “For when we fall we must continue to rise.”
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When Songs of Children Filled the Air
When Songs of Children Filled the Air by N. Joseph Glass is an alternate-history novel that takes the fear and grief surrounding September 11 and imagines what might have happened if the American response had pushed the country further into suspicion, retaliation, and open conflict. The story moves between several characters, including Allison, a mother trying to protect her children; Jake, a grieving widower; Farid, a Muslim NYPD officer caught between his faith and a country that increasingly distrusts him; and Musa, a teenage boy being pulled into terrorism by the adults around him. Glass begins with a crisis on September 11, 2002, then jumps backward to show how each character reached that moment. That structure gives the novel a constant sense of approaching danger, since we already know these separate lives are eventually going to collide.
What makes the book engaging is how much of its alternate history is experienced at ground level. Government decisions matter, but we usually see them through families being displaced, Muslims being detained, checkpoints appearing on ordinary roads, neighborhoods becoming hostile, and people deciding whom they can trust. Allison is particularly important because her fear is both understandable and dangerous. She wants to keep Megan and Ryan safe, yet that instinct sometimes hardens into prejudice. Farid provides one of the strongest counterpoints to that fear. He’s an American police officer who wants to protect people even while being treated as a threat himself. Jake’s friendship with Farid gradually becomes one of the book’s emotional anchors, while Musa’s chapters show how extremism can trap a young person who still has enough conscience to question what he’s being told. The characters don’t simply represent political positions. Their choices keep shifting as circumstances force them to see one another differently.
The novel reminded me at times of Stephen King’s 11/22/63, although Glass is interested in a different kind of alternate history. King uses a major American tragedy to ask what might change if history could be altered, while Glass imagines history taking a darker turn and then asks what ordinary people might do inside it. When Songs of Children Filled the Air also has a broader ensemble, moving quickly between perspectives and locations instead of staying with one central character. That approach creates suspense, especially as the story approaches the Philadelphia summit and the separate threads involving Allison, Jake, Farid, Megan, Ryan, and Musa begin converging. At the same time, the frequent shifts can make some sections feel more like pieces of a large political thriller than intimate character studies. Glass is most effective when the larger conflict becomes personal, such as Farid confronting the prejudice directed at him, Allison recognizing the cost of her own assumptions, or Musa staring at people he has been instructed to think of only as enemies.
The final confrontation brings the book’s central idea into clear focus. Megan, who is deaf, communicates with Musa through signs and written words while he stands before her wearing an explosive vest. Her message, “We do NOT hate you,” becomes more powerful than any political speech in the novel because it reaches a frightened teenager at the exact moment he has to decide what kind of person he wants to be. The 2026 epilogue carries that idea forward without pretending that one act has magically repaired the world. Instead, the novel treats hope as something built through recognition, empathy, and individual choices that interrupt cycles of retaliation. When Songs of Children Filled the Air is a political thriller, a family survival story, and a moral argument about what happens when fear turns people into categories. Its most memorable moments come when those categories collapse, and the characters finally see the human beings standing in front of them.
Pages: 447 | ASIN: B0HGSGK5L2
Crushed Azaleas
Amal Moulik’s Crushed Azaleas is a memoir built from vivid, self-contained memories of a childhood spent moving among India, Japan, England, and Italy. The son of an Indian diplomat who later worked for the United Nations, Moulik grows up surrounded by travel, education, culture, and material comfort, yet his most persistent concern is the meaning of home. Early in the memoir, he describes himself simply: “I remained an outsider.” That sense of displacement gives the book its emotional continuity. Moulik presents childhood through episodes shaped by the way memory actually works: certain rooms, conversations, humiliations, landscapes, meals, and pieces of music remain sharply illuminated while the years around them recede. He moves easily from a sunrise accompanied by an Indian morning raga to childhood mishaps in Tokyo, school life in London, family holidays in India, and adolescence in Rome. The result is a memoir in which geography matters deeply, but place is always connected to an internal search for belonging.
The book’s strongest quality is Moulik’s ability to preserve a child’s perspective while allowing the older writer to understand what the child couldn’t. That dual vision gives seemingly small incidents surprising emotional weight. A young Amal can marvel at an earthquake, quarrel over a handkerchief, misunderstand religious customs, or lose his breakfast to monkeys, while the adult narrator recognizes the larger questions those memories contain. Humor appears frequently and keeps the memoir intimate, particularly when childhood logic collides with adult expectations. At the same time, darker memories accumulate around his family. His father, Baba, is intellectually formidable, culturally sophisticated, and capable of introducing his son to beauty, but he’s also controlling and intensely concerned with achievement and obedience. His mother, Ma, is loving and spiritually influential, yet increasingly withdrawn as depression overtakes her daily life. Moulik’s treatment of both parents gains force from its specificity. He remembers food, clothing, music, gestures, arguments, and silences, allowing family relationships to emerge through scenes. The title itself comes to represent this mixture of beauty and injury, a pattern that extends through much of the memoir.
As Moulik grows older, Crushed Azaleas broadens into a thoughtful account of identity formation. His experiences with racism at school force him to understand how others interpret the color of his skin, while friendships across cultures and religions encourage him to resist inherited prejudices. His spiritual curiosity develops in much the same way. Hindu prayers associated with his mother, Christian scripture and hymns at school, Catholic Rome, and his own questioning temperament become parts of an evolving personal spirituality. Music provides an equally important language of connection. Indian classical music, opera, church music, and eventually Mahler accompany some of the memoir’s most significant moments, giving Moulik access to emotional territory that his family often struggles to express directly. These themes come together particularly well in the later Rome chapters, where adolescence brings greater independence. He begins challenging his father’s assumptions, defending friendships his father disapproves of, pursuing his own interests, and discovering the city beyond the controlled boundaries of family life. The international setting therefore becomes more than background. It shapes the author’s moral imagination, teaching him to examine nationality, race, faith, loyalty, and prejudice through lived encounters.
The closing sections give the memoir its deepest emotional resonance. The death of Moulik’s friend Marc, who introduced him more fully to Mahler, transforms a youthful friendship into a lifelong meditation on grief, just as the earlier death of Ram, the devoted family servant who cared for him as a child, becomes inseparable from childhood guilt. Moulik writes of Ram, “Writing this now is an act of self-forgiveness.” That sentence also describes much of the memoir’s larger purpose. In “Heart to Heart,” he looks back at the emotional structure of his family with unusual clarity, recognizing his father’s need for control, his mother’s suffering, and his own lifelong search for unconditional love. The epilogue then carries the idea of home beyond childhood, tracing Moulik’s later movement through London, the United States, and Germany before his eventual return to the country of his birth. Crushed Azaleas is therefore both a record of an unusually international upbringing and an examination of how a person turns scattered memories into a coherent understanding of self. Its lasting achievement is the way it holds beauty and pain in the same frame: the music, cities, friendships, humor, and moments of kindness remain as consequential as the loneliness and family wounds. Moulik’s memoir suggests that home can be carried through memory, relationship, art, and the difficult work of understanding the people who shaped us.
Pages: 231 | ASIN : B0GZV79RFH
The Falls of Us
E.M. Fowler’s The Falls of Us is a collection of eighteen short stories that moves between literary fiction, personal reflection, psychological drama, and speculative fiction while returning again and again to questions of faith, womanhood, family, grief, control, and survival. Some stories are rooted closely in lived experience, while others build unsettling imagined worlds to examine familiar human behavior from a different angle. The title story, for example, looks back at childhood, religious culture, abuse, and the complicated love between a daughter and her father, while stories such as “The Curse of Eve,” “Expiate,” and “We The People” push those concerns into dystopian settings. Even with that range, the collection feels connected because Fowler is consistently interested in what people carry privately and what happens when the systems around them make that burden heavier.
Fowler is especially good at turning physical objects and ordinary situations into extensions of a character’s inner life. “Water Damage” makes a worsening leak and repeated coats of paint part of a woman’s determination to cover over the collapse of her marriage. “The Blue Curtains” uses a dimmed home and an unreliable narrator to gradually reveal how a mother is shaping her daughter’s view of her father. In “Fragments,” memory itself becomes unstable as the story enters the confusion of dementia, while “The Quiet Never Comes” captures workplace exhaustion through a woman who longs so badly for silence that even escape starts to feel unreachable. The collection’s strongest moments often come when Fowler lets a concrete image do the emotional work. A stain, a ledge, a prayer closet, a pair of curtains, or a disabled car can carry far more weight than its literal purpose suggests.
Faith is one of the book’s most persistent threads, but Fowler approaches it from several directions. “Peace That Surpasses” follows a successful Christian speaker who continues preaching a clean story of healing while privately taking medication for the depression she claims to have overcome. “Confessions of an Innocent Sinner” considers the frightening distance between legal innocence and a person’s conviction that she is morally guilty. “Dying Day,” one of the collection’s most elaborate speculative pieces, turns spiritual gifts, discernment, ministry, exhaustion, and restoration into an imaginative world with its own visual language. Fowler also includes author’s notes with many of the stories, making the collection feel partly like fiction and partly like a conversation with the writer afterward. Those notes make her intentions unusually clear. At times they narrow some of the ambiguity the stories create, but they also give the book a personal, intimate quality, particularly when Fowler explains where a story intersects with her own experiences.
The Falls of Us will probably resonate most with readers who like emotionally direct short fiction with something moral, spiritual, or psychological to wrestle with after the plot ends. It’s especially well suited to readers interested in women’s experiences, complicated relationships with Christianity and religious culture, family wounds, grief, motherhood, social expectations, and the tension between control and surrender. Readers who enjoy moving between realistic stories and speculative ones will also find plenty here, since Fowler can go from the quiet loss of a friendship in “The Last Summer” to an invented society policing women’s voices or social behavior without abandoning the collection’s central concerns. What stays with you is Fowler’s interest in people reaching the point where whatever they’ve covered, suppressed, misunderstood, or tried to control finally demands to be seen.
Pages: 232 | ASIN: B0HF1BHHWY
Doll God
Luanne Castle’s Doll God is a poetry collection about the things we make, keep, inherit, damage, lose, and sometimes ask to stand in for us. Dolls are its most visible objects, but Castle quickly expands their meaning beyond childhood play. They become doubles, bodies, relics, artworks, containers of memory, and sometimes unnerving little witnesses. The collection is arranged in four sections, and its imagery moves outward from dolls and domestic objects into lakes, animals, family histories, marriage, illness, death, art, and questions of the sacred. Castle is especially interested in the strange border between an object and the life we invest in it. A doll can be tender, comic, damaged, threatening, or holy, sometimes within the same poem.
One of the pleasures of Doll God is how physical these poems are. Castle notices chipped paint, satin pillows, tangled hair, lake water, bird wings, scars, bones, cactus, glass, mud, thread, and household clutter with the eye of someone who understands that objects accumulate meaning simply by surviving beside us. In “Vintage Doll Buggy,” a child’s toy made from scrap metal carries the history of a factory that later produced rifle components, letting war, fertility, childhood, manufacturing, and memory occupy the same small object. Elsewhere, a Hakata figure becomes a way of seeing a husband and a marriage, while a jar of collected pebbles registers loss without needing to explain it away. Castle’s poems often work this way: they look closely at something ordinary until another emotional reality begins showing through it.
The collection grows more intimate as it goes. Family stories and remembered childhood scenes mingle with grief, strained relationships, aging, bodily vulnerability, and the knowledge that almost everything we love is temporary. Water keeps returning as lake, ocean, memory, danger, inheritance, and a place where the living search for the dead. In “A Bone Elegy,” childhood lake memories intertwine with surgery and the navicular bone, whose name comes from its resemblance to a small boat. The poem joins anatomy and memory so naturally that the body itself begins to feel like a vessel carrying earlier versions of the self. Castle also has a sly, surreal streak that keeps the book from settling into solemnity. A marriage becomes a business packaging arguments on meat trays, a morning cup of tea turns into an Alice-like trap, and God himself appears as a peculiar handmade figure with a notepad and a sighing pen.
By the final section, Doll God has widened into a meditation on creation itself: who makes whom, what survives its maker, and what kind of meaning can be fashioned from a mortal body in a mortal world. Castle’s spiritual imagination is grounded in animals, weather, plants, scars, ghosts, domestic rituals, and art. Her poems keep returning to the possibility that holiness may be less a distant answer than a way of paying attention. In “Focus,” the sacred finally resides in the palo verde, the cactus, the hummingbird, the burros and jackrabbits, while the elaborate religious apparatus falls away. That movement captures what the whole collection does so well: it takes the handmade, the wounded, the remembered, and the living seriously enough to let them become mysterious. Doll God makes a world of dolls, bones, scars, and memories feel charged with the startling possibility that everything we touch is already touching us back.
Pages: 118 | ASIN : B0H8B39LCL
The Angel of Death’s True Origins
Inside Heaven Inc. follows the reluctant Angel of Death as he navigates celestial bureaucracy, mythology, temptation, friendship, and the realization that redemption begins with taking responsibility for his choices. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The common portrayal of the Angel of Death in modern fiction is that of a lone figure. Yet, within the name there is a recognition of the Angel of Death’s true origins, that of being an angel. I wanted create a fresh take on a familiar trope by placing the Angel of Death in a world where fitting in with all that goes along with being an angel means as defined by the common portrayals of angels with within Christian, Jewish, and Islamic beliefs… with a twist. This particular angel, Azrael, ain’t a happy camper.
How did you decide which elements of biblical tradition, apocrypha, and mythology to incorporate or reinterpret?
Azrael, speaking in modern times, takes us back to when and why the job of Angel of Death became necessary—at the time humans entered the picture—and how he reluctantly got stuck with the job. While Genesis is natural starting point, there is a vast source of similar origin stories from other cultures that predates the Bible and offers stories that weren’t included. These sources combined to offer me, as a writer, a rich source of material for characters, events, and motivations that helped shape the celestial and earthly worlds I created. It’s a mythological retelling of sorts in the voice of a sarcastic narrator, Azrael, the Angel of Death who doesn’t see things the way you’d expect from an angel in Heaven.
Azrael’s sarcastic, conversational voice is central to the novel. How did you develop that voice, and did it change as you wrote?
I imagined Azrael as an everyman who’s not happy in his, and internalizes his disagreement with management’s way of doing things. An employee stuck in a job where he or she has few friends, working for a boss who doesn’t seem to care about his or her feelings, whose only objective is to see that Azrael gets the job done. The irreverent voice grows out of that perspective. Yet, as Azrael struggles over the centuries that follow, his view of Heaven and humans changes along with the narration style of his story.
Redemption becomes increasingly important as Azrael’s story unfolds. What do you hope readers take away from the novel’s ideas about accountability, mercy, and the possibility of change?
My first objective is that readers are entertained and enjoy Azrael’s story. The character might be snarky at times, ruffled by events that keep pushing him deeper and deeper into a job he never wanted, but that doesn’t mean Azrael can’t change. It takes courage for Azrael to admit to his own faults, to accept responsibility for what he has become, and when faced with eternal damnation, he will either rise above it or be condemned for eternity. Free will and accountability for the choices one makes in life aren’t unique to angels.
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When Azrael’s only friend, the Angel Samael, is dragged into Hell by Lucifer’s minions, Azrael must descend into the Abode of the Damned and confront the purpose he’s spent millennia railing against—his eternal fate hanging by a thread if he can’t embrace the destiny he never asked for.
A mythological reimagining of the Angel of Death—jaded and trapped in a job he never wanted, with only one way out… through Hell.
