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Healthcare Workers are the Real Heroes
Alone At The Hospital follows a cantankerous eighty-year-old as he wisecracks his way through doctors, nurses, hospital gowns, procedures, questionable meals, unwanted visitors, and two very long days away from home. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
As I continue with the George Ivers series, I thought how humorous it would be to put this character who is a cross between Archie Bunker, Fred Flintstone and Mr. Magoo in a hospital where he’d undergo a variety of procedures and have humorous conflicts with the hospital staff.
Beneath the comedy, the book explores dignity, independence, family, gratitude, and accepting care. Which of those themes became most important to you as the story developed?
I would say independence as George valued being the one in charge, but found himself being directed by the hospital staff – causing him much angst.
Doctors and nurses are frequently on the receiving end of George’s complaints, yet the novel ultimately treats healthcare workers with considerable affection. What did you hope to convey about the people working behind the humor of hospital life?
Our healthcare workers are real heroes in the way they care for patients. My experiences have all been positive, and I wanted to recognize them by dedicating this book to them.
Is this the end of George Ivers’s adventures, or could his particular talent for turning ordinary life into chaos bring him back for another story?
This is the third book in the George Ivers series. They are fun to write and I am planning on more. Maybe a Halloween book with George. I only can imagine what he would get into. LOL
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When cantankerous eighty-year-old George Ivers is rushed to the hospital, he expects a quick trip home. Instead, he finds himself admitted and wisecracking his way through a number of unwanted medical procedures while battling wits with the doctors and nurses.
George, who’s part Archie Bunker, Fred Flintstone and Mr. Magoo, must also survive uninvited visits from quirky family members and friends whose attempts to help only make matters hilariously worse.
You’ll laugh at George’s predicaments, smile at the kindness of those who care for him, and perhaps even see a little of yourself in his unforgettable journey. Warm, witty, and wonderfully relatable, Alone At The Hospital is a celebration of the remarkable healthcare professionals who care for us when we need them most and shows humor can be the best prescription.
Awakening
Chafin’s approach to horror relies heavily on the collision between the grotesque and the absurd. Navarro gradually assembles a functioning body from fungus, bones, animal remains, and human remains, creating some of the novel’s most disturbing images, yet his monstrous transformation is repeatedly interrupted by dogs stealing bones, neighbors misunderstanding what’s happening, and Rage responding to genuine supernatural danger with the judgment of a perpetually intoxicated adolescent. Fatty, Rage’s dog, is especially effective in this respect. His simple canine priorities repeatedly place him at the center of events, sometimes making him comic relief and sometimes making him unexpectedly consequential. The humor gives the novel an energetic, unpredictable rhythm, while the body horror becomes increasingly elaborate as Navarro acquires senses, limbs, voices, and greater knowledge of what Mother can do.
Beneath that surface, Awakening is deeply concerned with interconnectedness. Mother experiences life through a vast biological network, while Navarro’s resurrection gradually erases the boundaries separating one organism from another. Lisa’s consciousness becomes trapped within him after he incorporates her remains, animals contribute their senses and voices, and Rage experiences the fungus as an almost spiritual connection to other people and the earth. At one point, Mother is described as “a few million threads that wound together into a sort of democratically elected her,” an image that captures the book’s unusual conception of identity. Chafin repeatedly asks what remains of an individual when bodies, memories, desires, and consciousness can be absorbed into a larger living system. That idea gives the novel substance beyond its outrageous situations, particularly through Lisa, whose struggle to preserve her identity inside the man who murdered her adds a grim moral dimension to the supernatural premise.
The novel’s strongest quality is the way its separate characters and tones steadily converge. Rage’s mushroom-fueled experiences, Dora’s memories of her first husband, Pippi’s search for Bruno, Don’s determination to deal practically with an impossible threat, Lisa’s imprisonment, and Navarro’s growing ambitions all become parts of the same conflict. By the final confrontation, events that initially seemed like comic detours have acquired real significance, and even Rage is forced into a moment of genuine responsibility. Chafin closes the main story with consequences for both the survivors and the consciousnesses caught within Mother’s network, while leaving the larger biological threat alive for the series to continue. Awakening is an energetic mixture of supernatural horror, ecological speculation, irreverent comedy, and ensemble storytelling, held together by a striking central idea: life beneath the surface is conscious, hungry, interconnected, and beginning to wake.
Pages: 432 | ASIN : B0DJB23JGC
Innocence and Sarcasm
How a Sneeze Destroyed a Multi-Billion-Dollar Company follows a man who, after a devastating accident, receives an experimental computer interface and accidentally downloads his Linux computer directly into his consciousness. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
It’s the thing I would do. I have the photic sneeze effect that David has, and I thought, “Ok, what is the worst possible thing that could happen?” and then I made it happen. And before you ask me, yes, I would plug myself into my computer.
How do David’s extraordinary abilities change him as a person rather than simply making him more powerful?
At first, all he wanted was to rule the gaming world where he lives via his gaming console; then the upgrade/interfacing with Betsy allowed him to react with the outside world as they would with his games. Without worry of being made fun of due to his Asperger’s, giving him confidence through his newfound abilities.
Beneath its humor, the novel raises an enormous question: what would someone actually do if almost nothing were impossible for them? What interested you about exploring that idea?
Some would attempt to use the abilities for themselves and not for others, which is why I chose to explore the innocence and sarcasm of David’s life and help him create things to benefit others, which is his core persona.
The ending clearly leaves room for David, Betsy, Edith, and Harry to have more adventures. What possibilities excite you most about continuing their story?
Oh, the things they could do as a team. The Further Adventures of the Impossible 4 await, so get ready for more action and Impossible things. Albeit from the perspective of Edith and Harry.
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What would you do if you could do anything? Talk to the animals maybe? Well I can become them. What about learning a new language or two? I download them into my brain. Or how about printing your own money? Me? I only borrowed $5,000 and went on a shopping spree and look where it landed me hey! Working for the president on above top secret missions that’s where! Now how is all this possible? Well, a single sneeze not only turned my world upside down, it turned me into a super hero. Able to gain WIFI access with a single thought, download operating manuals for any vehicle from land through sea to aircraft. all in a single thought. The possibilities are endless to me and Betsy. Who is Betsy, my other half (Literally the other half of me) my home supercomputer I ended up downloading into my skull. My name is David Vincent Gillespie, and this is a story of how I managed to bring down a multi billion dollar company with a single sneeze.
Alone At The Hospital
Bob Adamov’s Alone At The Hospital is a lighthearted comic novel centered on George Ivers, an 80-year-old Southport, North Carolina resident whose determination to handle a simple household task sends him from a wobbly stepladder to a hospital bed. George’s fall while inspecting a smoke alarm becomes the starting point for an increasingly eventful stay filled with examinations, procedures, nurses, doctors, unexpected visitors, and repeated assaults on his sense of dignity. Adamov establishes George quickly as stubborn, sarcastic, and convinced of his own competence, even when the evidence points in another direction. His explanation after falling, “I meant to do that,” captures the combination of pride and humor that defines him throughout the novel.
Much of the book’s energy comes from George’s running commentary on hospital life. Medical procedures that could otherwise make the story uncomfortable or clinical become opportunities for jokes, exaggerated comparisons, and verbal sparring with the people caring for him. His interactions with Nurse Retch are particularly important, since her stern efficiency gives George a strong personality to push against. The novel is highly episodic, moving from one test, meal, bathroom mishap, or interruption to the next, and Adamov relies heavily on dialogue to maintain its brisk pace. George’s complaints about gowns, hospital food, pain medication, medical equipment, and invasive procedures give the book the feel of an extended comic routine grounded in recognizable anxieties about being a patient.
The hospital stay also becomes a setting for a broader family comedy. Charlotte understands her husband well enough to challenge him without being overwhelmed by his dramatics, while Ethel and Bernie introduce an additional level of chaos. Bernie’s wheelchair excursion with George, Ethel’s exuberant visits, and several unfortunate encounters with hospital equipment expand the story beyond jokes about medicine and reveal how affection operates within this eccentric family. Beneath George’s irritation, his relationships are defined by familiarity and attachment. Even when he tries to remain hospitalized for an extra night simply to avoid Ethel and Bernie at home, his behavior feels less like rejection than another expression of the teasing, exasperated affection that shapes the family.
By the end, Alone At The Hospital brings its comedy back to the quieter concerns introduced at the beginning. George returns home to discover that his unsafe ladder has been replaced with a comically overprotected version, then settles outside with Charlotte and Snookums. That shift gives the book a warm conclusion and places the preceding mishaps in a larger context of aging, independence, family, gratitude, and care. George finally acknowledges, “We’re blessed,” a simple admission that carries weight after two days spent resisting nearly everyone trying to help him. Adamov has written a character-driven hospital comedy whose humor comes from one man’s stubborn refusal to surrender his personality, even when circumstances force him to surrender control. Its lasting appeal lies in the affection surrounding that stubbornness and in the recognition that being cared for can be frustrating, embarrassing, funny, and deeply meaningful at the same time.
Pages: 140 | ASIN : B0H8T8ZDJF
How a Sneeze Destroyed a Multi-Billion-Dollar Company
How a Sneeze Destroyed a Multi-Billion-Dollar Company by Nightdancer Slater is a fast-moving science fiction action comedy built around one wonderfully strange chain reaction. David Vincent Gillespie has a violent photic sneeze while driving, crashes into a freight train, suffers catastrophic spinal injuries, and eventually receives an experimental computer interface that helps restore his mobility. Things get considerably stranger when David plugs himself into his beloved Linux gaming computer, Betsy, and her operating system merges with his consciousness. From that point on, the novel treats the human body like editable computer hardware, giving David and Betsy an expanding collection of abilities that turn a medical experiment into a wild sci-fi adventure.
The biggest personality in the book is David himself. He narrates everything with sarcasm, wordplay, deliberate mispronunciations, inappropriate jokes, and a habit of talking directly to the reader as though he’s telling the whole story across a table. That makes this as much comic science fiction as it is an action story. Betsy is a great match for him because she gradually develops from David’s favorite computer into a genuine character and partner, capable of repairing his body, downloading skills, manipulating biological “data,” and eventually transforming living tissue into different species. The possibilities keep escalating, from night vision and instant martial arts knowledge to sonar, animal transformations, regeneration, and some extremely inventive uses of shapeshifting. The fun comes from watching David encounter each ridiculous new possibility and almost immediately find an even more ridiculous way to use it.
Once David’s abilities attract government attention, the book becomes an episodic science fiction action novel full of secret missions, criminals, terrorists, kidnappings, hidden compounds, shootouts, helicopters, underground bunkers, and increasingly bizarre escapes. His battles with Mr Bleach are especially entertaining because David approaches potentially deadly situations with the attitude of someone who’s more interested in annoying the villain than delivering a heroic speech. Later developments broaden the story considerably. Betsy gains an independent human body, David and Betsy marry, and their extraordinary twins Edith and Harry inherit abilities that make their parents look almost ordinary. By the closing chapters, the story has turned its central technological idea into an entire super-powered family dynamic, with the children downloading languages, solving seemingly impossible problems, transforming themselves, and joining their parents’ adventures.
What gives How a Sneeze Destroyed a Multi-Billion-Dollar Company its particular flavor is its refusal to keep its imagination on a leash. It’s a humorous science fiction novel, a superhero-style adventure, a technology fantasy, a crime caper, and eventually a family comedy, all filtered through David’s relentlessly mischievous narration. Ideas arrive quickly and tend to grow into bigger ones, so the story has the feel of someone enthusiastically asking, “What could happen next?” and then choosing the most chaotic answer available. Beneath all the transformations and jokes, there’s also a warm thread running through David’s relationships with Betsy, his mother, his children, and even people he meets through his missions. The ending deliberately leaves their strange family adventure open for more, closing with a promise that there’s more trouble, technology, transformation, and comic science fiction madness still to come.
Pages: 106 | ISBN : 9798260307014
Autocrat
Autocrat, by Jeff Nesbit, is a scalding political satire about Rex Vanner, a broke-but-blustering reality-TV mogul who runs for president as a bargaining stunt and discovers that grievance, spectacle, and shamelessness can become a governing philosophy. With the help of the coldly analytical Elias Thorne and a cast of zealots, billionaires, opportunists, and true believers, Rex turns public life into a ratings machine until the joke hardens into authoritarian rule.
I found the book both funny and queasy-making, which is exactly the pressure point it seems designed to hit. Nesbit writes in broad, acid colors: gold rooms, trembling aides, performative cruelty, political rallies that feel like bad comedy clubs with worse consequences. The satire isn’t subtle, but subtlety would almost feel dishonest here. The novel works because it understands the grotesque intimacy between entertainment and power, how a crowd can be trained to mistake humiliation for truth.
What I appreciated most was the way the book treats autocracy not as a lightning strike but as a series of small permissions. People laugh, excuse, profit, rationalize, and soon the machinery is moving on its own. Rex is ridiculous, but the people around him are often more frightening because they are less ridiculous. Elias, Jared Caine, and Julian Silk give the novel its colder edge; they see Rex not as a leader but as a door left unlocked. That makes the book feel less like a parody of one man and more like an autopsy of a culture willing to be entertained into submission.
This book is for readers of political satire, dystopian fiction, authoritarian thrillers, and near-future satire, especially those who like their comedy barbed and their warnings delivered with a grin full of broken glass. Readers who enjoyed Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here will recognize the same dread, though Nesbit’s version is louder, more media-drunk, and built for the age of screens. Autocrat is a brutal carnival mirror held up to democracy, and the most disturbing thing about it is how familiar the reflection looks.
Pages: 289 | ASIN : B0GX313SRZ
Laylah’s Revenge
Laylah’s Revenge, by Lisa Marie Shankles, is a comic crime caper with a wild streak of speculative fiction, mixing sibling rivalry, prison schemes, mistaken identity, Scandinavian settings, ghost lore, and alien mischief into one strange, busy ride. The story follows Laylah as she gets out of prison and sets her sights on revenge against her twin sister, Lilah, whose new life in Sweden with Birger and the mysterious cat Dyngus only makes Laylah more determined to meddle, impersonate, and stir up chaos.
What stood out to me most was the book’s willingness to be odd. It doesn’t tiptoe into its absurdity. It runs straight at it. I liked that. The plot has the energy of a prank that keeps getting bigger than anyone planned, and Shankles clearly enjoys putting her characters in messy situations just to see how far they will go. Laylah is petty, jealous, clever, and often ridiculous, but she is never dull. Lilah, by contrast, brings a softer kind of tension because she still has love for her sister even when she knows Laylah is trouble.
The writing has a loose, playful feel that fits the genre well. As a comic mystery and sci-fi caper, the book works best when it leans into its own weird blend of revenge plotting, mistaken identity, alien cats, and culture-clash humor. Some moments are wonderfully goofy, especially when everyday details like hair salons, meatballs, prison gossip, and travel plans collide with telepathy and fourth-dimensional escapes. At times, the story can feel somewhat crowded, with a lot of names, schemes, and side turns competing for attention. Still, I found myself pulled along because the book has unmistakable personality.
I would recommend Laylah’s Revenge to readers who enjoy quirky, fast-moving comic fiction and don’t mind their crime stories sprinkled with aliens, ghosts, and over-the-top family drama. This isn’t a quiet literary novel, and it’s not trying to be. It’s more like sitting with a friend who keeps saying, “Wait, it gets stranger,” and somehow, it does. Readers who like offbeat genre mashups, mischievous characters, and chaotic sister dynamics will probably have the most fun with it.
Pages: 210 | ASIN : B0CQYK3V4L
Absurdist Adventure
Lies, Lust, and Larceny follows twin sisters whose retirement plans spiral into an adventure that includes identify theft, Norwegian prison fantasies, and an alien encounter. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I saw a YouTube video about Norwegian prisons and how progressive and humane they are. They looked like dorms or three-star hotels with great food and full amenities! I wondered if anyone had ever tried to get arrested and convicted to gain long-term entrance to these comfortable facilities. Then I built a story around how to + make it happen and I came up with Lies, Lust, and Larceny.
Lilah is more curious and open to adventure, while Laylah is often fueled by envy. How did you develop their contrasting personalities?
I tried to imagine two sides to any given personality and divided them in half and came up with Lilah and Laylah. I wanted them to be mirror images of each other with similarities as well as differences.
The novel often feels like someone telling an unbelievable story over coffee. Was creating that conversational energy part of your writing approach?
I wanted it to come across with the feel of an absurdist adventure novel that spirals out of control with every twist and turn. I wanted the reader to suspend disbelief enough to entertain the notion of alien beings, a 4th dimension, and going to prison on purpose.
What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available?
Lies, Lust, and Larceny is part 1 of a 4-part series with an addendum. All the parts have been published and are available on Amazon.com.
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