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Aurora Rift: A Man Out of Time
The Aurora Rift, by Thomas LeBrun, is a time-travel science fiction adventure built around a wonderfully strange idea: the Northern Lights can become a natural fracture in time. Dr. Kyle Richards, an evolutionary anthropologist, martial artist, husband, and father, gets caught beneath an intense aurora in Norway and finds himself thrown thousands of years into the past. From there, the novel becomes a historical science fiction journey through civilizations and centuries, with Kyle repeatedly pulled from one era to another while trying to understand the force that’s moving him and find a path back to his family.
What gives this time travel adventure its personality is the way Kyle experiences history from ground level. He doesn’t simply observe famous periods from a safe distance. He eats with prehistoric hunters, lives among Vikings, crosses the Mongolian steppe, encounters figures such as Temüjin, Attila, Marco Polo, and Kublai Khan, and finds himself surrounded by societies that are completely ordinary to the people living in them. LeBrun spends a lot of time on food, clothing, weapons, shelter, travel, language, and the practical business of staying alive, which gives the historical adventure side of the novel an almost episodic quality. Each new period presents Kyle with the same deceptively difficult problem: how does a modern man survive in another civilization without changing that civilization simply by being there?
The other half of the story belongs to Samantha and the people searching for Kyle in the present, and that thread gives the science fiction more emotional weight. Kyle’s journey might involve geomagnetic storms, temporal corridors, ancient empires, and questions about whether history can be altered, but his motivation stays remarkably personal. He wants to get home. As the jumps accumulate, the most interesting change isn’t technological or historical. It’s Kyle himself. His modern clothes disappear, his appearance changes, his body takes a beating, and centuries of human experience start piling up in his memory. The book gradually turns the idea of being “a man out of time” from a catchy premise into a genuine identity problem. How much history can someone carry and still return to the life he remembers?
As historical science fiction and time travel fiction, The Aurora Rift moves quickly and thinks on a big scale. Its style is direct and visual, with frequent action, survival challenges, historical encounters, and cliffhanger-like transitions that keep pushing Kyle toward the next century. At the same time, there’s a consistent fascination with ordinary human behavior beneath all that history: fear of strangers, respect earned through restraint, generosity between people who share no language, and the importance of family when everything familiar has been stripped away. By the time Kyle’s long journey circles back toward the mystery of the Alta carvings, the novel has connected its opening archaeological puzzle to something much more personal. And its final pages make it clear that the Aurora Rift may have finished one journey while opening the door to another.
Pages: 266 | ASIN : B0H9FVPX3J
Supernatural Event
Out of the Thicket follows the people of Yana who, for over a decade, have had all their twelve-year-old boys vanish on the same night each year; only this year, two boys decide to run, trying to escape their fate. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
One evening, an image popped into my mind unbidden: a man and a woman sitting on the ground facing one another, with a boy between them. I thought, “That’s a strange idea. Maybe I can make a story out of that.” I had to ask, “Who are these people, and why are they sitting like that?” From there, I came up with the ritual surrounding the supernatural event called the Seizing that serves as the backdrop for my story.
What interested you about exploring faith through characters who do not always agree about what they believe or how belief should guide them?
I wanted to write a book that showed the struggle of faith. Jacob, the patriarch from the Bible, is a very important character to me. He wrestled with God and was blessed for it. I wanted to depict people who wrestled with doubt, beliefs, religion, prayer, and God’s silence. I think many books addressing faith make life too clean and easy. I wanted to mirror what faith looks like in the real world through my fantasy.
Yana has developed traditions, sayings, prejudices, religious practices, and rituals around its history. How did you approach creating a culture shaped by generations of fear and loss?
I had a lot of fun creating the world of Out of the Thicket. My starting point was the biblical world of the Old Testament, a place guided by sacred texts, complicated by corrupt religious leaders, and visited by mysterious prophets. A land where miracles happen. But I didn’t want it to read like Bible fan fiction or historical fiction, so I made up new cities, backstories, rituals, and proverbs. I hope the result is a story that arrives in a world that already feels lived in.
What is the next book that you are working on, and when will it be available?
I’m working on a dystopian, three-volume southern gothic tale about truth. Like Out of the Thicket, it contains some elements of magical realism. I’m taking my time with it and have no idea when it will be published.
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One mother, Ramia, refuses to participate in the ritual, which infuriates Hannah, revealing that her motives have more to do with issues surrounding her own son’s untimely death. When Ramia’s son, Hazaq, and his best friend, Bear, try to escape The Seizing by running away, Yana is thrown into a maelstrom of intrigue and doubt.
Featuring a cast of fiercely independent female leads, heartwarming childhood friendships, complex villains, sage prophets, and dubious religious leaders who are caught in an entertaining plot full of twists,
Out of the Thicket is a story about the sacrificial nature of love.
A Sense of Belonging
Tales of New Stenchford follows a scrappy petty criminal navigating a filthy, dangerous, and absurd fantasy city filled with crooks, nobles, monsters, and chaos. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I was born and raised in Manhattan in the 1970s and ’80s, and for reasons I don’t fully understand, I was always drawn to the city’s underbelly. I explored deserted subway tunnels, decommissioned ship piers, condemned buildings—anywhere with a “Keep Out” sign.
I met all sorts of marginalized people and discovered elaborate worlds hidden away inside the city. Still, it wasn’t any one thing in particular that I was seeking; it was a feeling, a sense of belonging that coaxed me onto buses and under bridges to commune with something I couldn’t describe but knew felt right.
Alongside all of that, I had a family that introduced me to opera, museums, and fine dining. I experienced the world that lived high above the scrappy streets and had to wrestle with the dissonance. I experienced the city on many levels and brought its richness to New Stenchford.
I think it’s fair to say that when you ask about “navigating a filthy, dangerous, and absurd fantasy city filled with crooks, nobles, monsters, and chaos,” you might be referring to New Stenchford, but you could just as easily be talking about my hometown.
Rizzle is treated as an outcast by many people, yet he seems perfectly at home in the city’s streets. What does his relationship with New Stenchford reveal about his character?
The book had to begin with Rizzle. It had to start with something base and real, not a square-jawed hero with wavy blond hair.
Rizzle is a dirty little scoundrel, but he has a big heart, not unlike Ratso Rizzo from Midnight Cowboy. Rizzle is pragmatic and can bend his morals to fit whatever situation he might find himself in, but he is not a sociopath. He has empathy for his fellow city dwellers, even if sometimes he uses it to con them.
People look down on Rizzle, but he doesn’t need their approval; he has the city. New Stenchford keeps him warm, fed, and protected, even if those things require a bit of thievery and stealth to acquire.
Rizzle can see the rich living high on the hog, but he knows their secrets. He knows who is addicted to what and who is cheating with whose wife. It gives Rizzle a no-nonsense point of view that allows him to see the world clearly.
The novel contains numerous intersecting plots, including political corruption, organized crime, forbidden romance, religious conspiracies, curses, and magical disasters. How did you approach bringing those seemingly unrelated threads together?
Believe it or not, when I sat down to write the book, I had nothing but a cluster of characters and locations. I didn’t have a plot, a theme, or an outline.
I just sat down one afternoon and started writing the book chronologically, moving from one scene to the next without knowing anything about where I was going.
The resulting book is a little scattered, but I don’t think I could have written it any other way. I needed to let the characters and situations dictate what happened next; otherwise, I think it would have felt stale.
It wasn’t until I was more than halfway through the book that I started jotting down notes and making plans. It wasn’t until I reached the last chapter that I knew how the book ended.
If you could spend one day in New Stenchford, where would you go—and what would you do your best to avoid?
The answer to both of these questions is one place: the Last Resort. It is probably the smelliest, most dangerous place in town, but that’s where all the action is. It’s a dirt-floor bar down by the Pue River near the center of town. In a later book, I explain that although the Last Resort has windows, sunlight does not come through them for fear of what it might illuminate.
You don’t know what might happen in that rundown little shack, but that’s what makes it interesting. Yes, it’s possible you might lose a limb or end up with vomit in your hair, but you won’t be bored. The palace will no doubt be a predictable pageant of arrogance and sycophancy, and the inns will be crowded and hot, but in the Last Resort, you might see something truly novel. It might be something you wish you had never seen at all, but it won’t be boring.
Tales of New Stenchford is the first in the New Stenchford Series. There are ten books in the series. A new one will be published approximately every five months.
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
Queen Strongbottom, brave of heart, strong of bottom, runs the place, but has no idea that Wanda Stickybuns, the secret mistress of Queen Strongbottom’s father Gluteus, is plotting to overthrow the King and install her illegitimate two-headed son on the throne.
If you choose to come and see for yourself you’ll want to keep a close eye on your belongings and wash your hands thoroughly when you get home, if you get home.
Tales of New Stenchford
Tales of New Stenchford, by Ben Rubin, is a sprawling comic fantasy built around a city that feels equal parts medieval kingdom, pop-culture junk drawer, political farce, and fever dream. The book follows a large cast, but Rizzle the Weasel serves as its scruffy gravitational center. He’s a homeless petty criminal who knows the city’s alleys, businesses, crooks, nobles, and monsters better than almost anyone. Early on, Rubin captures his relationship with New Stenchford nicely: while the citizens treat Rizzle as someone to avoid, “the streets themselves seemed to welcome him.” That idea ends up fitting the whole novel. Rizzle belongs to this filthy, dangerous, ridiculous place because he’s every bit as resourceful and morally flexible as the city itself.
The book’s biggest pleasure is its relentless world-building. New Stenchford is crowded with witches, orcs, trolls, vampires, talking spiders, cursed hybrids, corrupt officials, crime families, brothels, breweries, temples, sausage shops, and fountains nobody should drink from. Rubin keeps adding jokes at the level of names, businesses, creatures, historical references, and background details, so even a walk across town can become a string of comic discoveries. Characters named Janet Jackson, Sid the Vicious, Taylor the Swift, Colonel Mustard, and George R. R. Martin coexist with creations like snittens, crabbits, Sharkaroos, and Camoostapuses. The references are usually folded into the fantasy world, which gives the setting its peculiar personality. The result feels like a place that has been allowed to grow wildly in every direction.
Underneath all that silliness, there’s a surprisingly elaborate collection of intersecting stories. A doomed brewery, a forbidden romance between Ananas and Piña, Michael Jackson’s lycanthropy, Grimenail’s secret religious conspiracy, the Followers of Tim, a philosophical giant spider named Cilantro, Hernia’s curses, organized crime, political corruption, and an increasingly unstable monarchy all begin as separate threads and gradually crash into one another. The novel’s episodic structure gives Rubin room to wander, and that abundance is both part of its charm and occasionally a source of drag. Some side stories and extended bits temporarily bury the larger plot, but the payoff is that New Stenchford starts to feel populated. By the time the palace falls and Rizzle accidentally emerges from the rubble wearing the queen’s crown, the joke works because the book has spent so much time establishing how this society operates.
Rubin’s humor is broad, profane, pun-heavy, frequently grotesque, and committed to escalation. Deaths can be gruesome, sex jokes can get cheerfully tasteless, and philosophical quotations may turn up in the mouth of a thirty-foot spider that’s considering eating somebody. The political satire becomes especially funny once Rizzle is mistaken for a divinely appointed ruler. At his coronation, he offers the crowd a mangled bit of motivational rhetoric: “This’ll be one uh dem real win-win type deals fer all uh us.” It’s a good example of the book’s method. Lofty institutions keep colliding with characters who are venal, confused, horny, hungry, frightened, or simply trying to get through the day. Even when the jokes are absurd, the selfishness, incompetence, ambition, and accidental consequences underneath them are recognizable.
What I liked most about Tales of New Stenchford is the sense that the book genuinely enjoys its own world. It keeps finding another door to open, another resident to introduce, and another ridiculous consequence to set loose. The ending makes that especially clear. After revolutions, curses, magical disasters, political reshuffling, and a brief hope that things might settle down, Rizzle discovers that another enormous problem is literally stomping toward him, and his response is simply, “Oh no.” It’s an apt final note for a novel whose basic rhythm is order, chaos, temporary recovery, and fresh chaos. Tales of New Stenchford is a rowdy ensemble fantasy satire with an unusually dense comic world, and its strongest quality is the sheer enthusiasm with which it keeps that world moving.
Pages: 253 | ASIN : B0H7DGGBVP
Sword and Sorcery
Drop follows a ruthless Fort Worth cop turned supernatural enforcer as he battles sorcerers, monsters, and shifting alliances in a hidden war that threatens to spill into the everyday world. What were some sources that informed this novel’s development?
My imagination. I also talked to several police officers to get information about police procedures. One of my degrees is a Bachelor of Science in Criminal Justice with a minor in police procedures. I live in Fort Worth, which gave me insight into the city, streets, and neighborhoods.
The combat scenes in Drop are described almost move by move; did your interest or experience in martial arts influence how you choreographed Jax’s fights?
I have always been a fan of martial arts and sword and sorcery. I have also taken Kung Fu lessons as a teenager.
Jax’s magical gauntlets allow him to summon different weapons depending on the situation. Where did that idea come from, and how do you decide which weapon he uses in a particular battle?
The idea of using different weapons kind of grew organically in the story. The original idea and his staple weapons are Dai Katana’s or Japanese short swords. A scene came about, and I remember watching the movie Ninja Assassin and loving the weapon scenes. The choice was made.
Drop features several competing factions and characters whose loyalties continually shift. How do you keep track of those alliances while plotting the larger supernatural conflict?
When I bring in a character, I have some idea of what their purpose is. So it is a matter of the character finding their way through the story to their conclusion. There are some characters I do not plan on dying, but it just happens that way. I also tried to play on their motives, like greed and power. At a certain point, a person reaches a plateau in their life and will either be happy there or want to move past their “master” kind of like Sith.
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Gritty, fast-paced, and unapologetically raw, DROP plunges readers deep into the underbelly of urban crime, where loyalty is tested, trust is deadly, and one wrong move can end everything. Perfect for fans of hard-edged police procedurals and modern crime thrillers that don’t flinch from the truth.
A Gray Line
The Quest for Freedom follows a human slave whose escape ignites a rebellion that transforms a scattered people into an army and forces a world built on slavery to fear the humans it once chained. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
There wasn’t really one thing that inspired Conquest. I love fantasy, and LOTR and The Inheritance Cycle are some of my favorite books, but I only took small bits from them as motivation. The actual story of Conquest just popped into my head, and I’ve been building up the world of Affer ever since I started writing the first book.
Fletcher is driven by both justice and revenge. How did you approach writing a hero who is inspiring but also frighteningly ruthless?
In order to write Fletcher and how I created him in the first place, I first asked myself what a great leader is. To me, that’s someone who can rally his people but also strike fear into his enemies. A great leader needs to understand when to step back, when to attack, when to show mercy, and that he needs to stand strong even against impossible odds. Another defining part of Fletcher is that I don’t really think of him as the hero. He most certainly isn’t the villain, but at the same time, he’s willing to do whatever it takes to achieve his species’ freedom. Which sometimes teeters on a gray line of right and wrong.
Ji, Crystal, Tor, and Leon each bring a different energy to Fletcher’s rebellion. Which character surprised you most while writing?
Easily Ji. In the beginning, I didn’t even intend for Ji to come with Fletcher, and then it quickly hit me how big a mistake that would be.
Unlike Fletcher, Ji hasn’t been training to be a leader. He’s great with a sword and learns faster than Fletcher, but where he differs from the main character is that you see him grow and become stronger. Fletcher’s already resilient and hellbent on doing whatever it takes to achieve freedom, and rightfully so; he’s dedicated his life to the goal. However, Ji is a much different story. While Ji isn’t weak, he didn’t dedicate over half his life to changing the course of history like Fletcher.
As the first book in The Conquest Trilogy, how much of the larger war did you already have planned before writing this opening installment?
When I started writing Conquest, I didn’t have anything planned. I just wrote what came to mind, but that changed very quickly, and by the time the first book was done, I had basically planned out every bit of the story. Now, I’m just putting pen to paper, or words to a blank document, and changing up bits as I see fit.
The story of Conquest has just begun, and the scale of the world and battle grows much larger.
Author Links: GoodReads | Instagram | Website | Amazon
From slave, to soldier, to king…that is Fletcher Rush. The man who craves more than just his freedom; he wants to see the cities of his enemies stained in blood. It won’t be enough until every last human is free, and those who shackled them in chains have been brought to their knees.
For centuries, humans have been enslaved, and hope has long since vanished. But that all changes. The fire that has lain dormant is rekindled, and humans quickly rally behind Fletcher. Finding a purpose greater than their lives, no battle is impossible. Humans will reclaim their former glory, and the planet Affer shall once again fear them.
Fear can keep a species enslaved…but it can also bring a planet to its knees.
5 Steps You Must Take to Win the Battle of the Mind
5 Steps You Must Take to Win the Battle of the Mind, by Joe Roach, is a Christian guide to confronting fear, anxiety, doubt, racing thoughts, and depression through the lens of spiritual warfare. Roach frames the mind as a contested place where lies must be recognized, resisted, and replaced with biblical truth. The book moves through five steps: understanding the battle, acknowledging troubling thoughts, identifying the enemy’s lies, guarding the mind with Scripture and gratitude, and building a disciplined daily rhythm of prayer, meditation, devotion, and thought inventory. Along the way, it folds in biblical stories, practical exercises, a “Power in Your Pocket” section of truth cards, and a thirty-day devotional meant to help readers carry the teaching into ordinary mornings, anxious nights, and repeated inner struggles.
I appreciated the book’s insistence that thought patterns matter deeply, not in a vague self-help sense, but as part of a spiritual and emotional life that requires attention, honesty, and practice. Roach is at his strongest when he gets close to the lived experience of mental battle: waking with racing thoughts, feeling accused by old labels, or needing something steadier than willpower when fear starts circling the room at night. The suggestion to write down looping lies, replace them with Scripture, and keep truth close in tangible form, even on simple 3×5 cards, has a humble practicality I found moving because it’s usable. There’s also a welcome generosity in the chapter on medication, where the book avoids treating medical support as a failure of faith and instead allows room for God to work through professionals, treatment, prayer, and slow healing together.
The writing is earnest and direct. The Q&A sections are useful, especially for readers new to spiritual warfare. There’s sincerity here that’s hard to dismiss. Roach writes like someone who wants readers to stop being bullied by their own inner darkness, and that urgency gives the book its pulse.
I came away from Win the Battle of the Mind with respect for its pastoral seriousness and its belief that freedom is cultivated through daily surrender, not dramatic shortcuts. Its best moments are practical, compassionate, and bracingly clear: identify the lie, speak the truth, return again tomorrow. I’d recommend it especially to Christian readers who want a Scripture-centered, action-oriented approach to anxiety, negative thinking, and spiritual discipline, particularly those who find comfort in devotionals, guided routines, and concrete tools they can use throughout the day. This is a book for believers who don’t merely want to understand the battle of the mind but want to begin fighting it with steadier hands and renewed hope.
Pages: 209 | ASIN : B0G5261VHZ
Escala’s Wish
Escala’s Wish, by David James, is the best fantasy novel I’ve read that also understands bar management. Yes, there are pixies, courts, curses, wolves, dragons, betrayals, forbidden love, and world-ending magic, but the book’s real engine is a gnome bard trying to hold a room. Wigfrith Foreverbloom doesn’t merely narrate the story; he sells it, seasons it, interrupts it, jokes through it, and keeps checking the emotional temperature of his audience. That framing makes the novel feel less like a book being read in silence and more like an event you accidentally wandered into and then refused to leave.
What I enjoyed most was that the book treats storytelling as a kind of magic equal to spells, swords, or faerie dust. Escala’s journey begins with reckless curiosity and grows into guilt, courage, love, and sacrifice, but the novel never lets us forget that her story is also being shaped by the person telling it. Wigfrith’s asides are funny, sometimes shameless, and occasionally ridiculous, yet they give the darker material a human pulse. The result is a fantasy adventure that understands tragedy lands harder when someone has just made you laugh.
Escala’s Wish is not really about whether Escala can fix what she broke. It’s about whether a story can make a life matter after law, memory, politics, and shame have tried to erase it. The Wane is terrifying because it’s not just death, but disappearance, and that idea quietly haunts the whole novel. Against that, the book offers friendship, song, love, witness, and one very persistent bard as acts of resistance. Escala’s wish becomes larger than Escala herself; it becomes a demand that the world remember what mercy costs.
The book is big, dramatic, sentimental, playful, and occasionally unabashedly theatrical. It has the generosity of a long-running tabletop campaign without feeling like a transcript of one, and its emotional sincerity gives the sprawling lore a beating heart. Readers who want lean, minimalist fantasy may find it too expansive, but those who enjoy being pulled into a full evening’s tale, with jokes, danger, romance, and a crowd leaning closer by the chapter, will find a lot to love. Escala’s Wish won me over because it understands that sometimes the oldest kind of fantasy pleasure is still the best: someone stands up, says “listen,” and then gives you a story worth staying for.
Pages: 659 | ASIN : B0G1XRP6DW
