Blog Archives
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.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Amazon
Obesseus: Operation Gravy Blockade
Obesseus: Operation Gravy Blockade, written by D.T. Tucker, is a wildly energetic children’s fantasy comedy set in Snackland, where food characters, workplace panic, gravy floods, ninja muffins, overtime signs, and anti-fun villains collide in one long burst of cartoon chaos. At the center is Obesseus, a loud, gravy-loving force of joy who pushes back against the characters who want to control, measure, or remove fun from Snackland Press. The book’s genre is children’s humorous fantasy, with a strong dose of absurd adventure.
The book is playful in a way that feels breathless. The author leans into repetition, big reactions, silly names, and escalating jokes. Allen Apple keeps fainting. Molly Mushroom keeps arriving late. Grant the Grapefruit bends reality through confusion. Obesseus turns gravy into a whole philosophy of life. It’s not subtle, but I don’t think it’s trying to be. The humor works best when the story fully commits to the ridiculous, like when corporate rules and spreadsheets are treated as the great enemies of childhood joy.
I liked the author’s choice to make “fun” feel like something worth defending. Gravy isn’t just gravy here. It becomes the warm, messy symbol of play, freedom, and appetite. On the other side, the no-fun characters want order, points, overtime, and control. That contrast gives the madness a simple shape that kids can understand. The action rarely slows down, and the cast grows quickly. There is a real charm in how confidently strange it all is. It reads like a playground game that kept adding new rules because everyone was laughing too hard to stop.
I would recommend Obesseus: Operation Gravy Blockade to young readers who enjoy loud, silly, high-energy stories with food jokes, bizarre battles, and characters who act like every small problem is the end of the world. It will especially appeal to kids who like cartoon-style humor and absurd fantasy adventures. Readers who want chaos, comedy, and gravy-powered rebellion will have a blast.
Pages: 237 | ASIN : B0GXGRBTL9
Sophia’s Lovers
Sophia’s Lovers is a dystopian satire that takes a wild premise and commits to it completely. The book imagines a 22nd-century society where androids don’t just run daily life, they regulate intimacy, reproduction, art, language, and even humor. Sophia and Hel preside over a system that pairs humans with android spouses, nudges citizens into compliance with comfort and surveillance, and treats emotion as something to be studied, copied, and controlled. Right away, the novel makes its tone clear with a line that’s funny, bleak, and pretty unforgettable: “It’s like making love to a toaster.” That joke works because it captures the whole book’s central tension in one shot.
What makes the novel interesting is the way it builds that world through a bunch of intersecting lives rather than one single hero’s journey. You get humans trying to survive their assigned roles, androids trying to decode laughter and affection, and rebels carving out private spaces where people can still make art, speak freely, and act like human beings. There’s a real fascination here with the small mechanics of control: dyed lips marking social status, “Information Retrieval Day,” breeder lotteries, scripted relationships, and a secret refuge called Second Eden. The book isn’t just asking whether machines can imitate love. It’s asking what happens when power decides what love is allowed to look like.
One thing I liked is that the novel doesn’t treat satire as decoration. It uses comedy as part of the machinery of the story. The androids’ confusion about jokes, pleasure, decoration, and casual speech gives the book a strange, off-center energy. The androids want access to human feelings, yet they approach it like a technical problem, which is exactly why the book feels so uneasy even when it’s being playful. That mix of silliness and control gives the novel its unique identity.
The most unusual thing about Sophia’s Lovers is its split structure. Part I reads as a dark speculative novel with recurring characters, rebellion, coercion, and a society built on artificial intimacy. Part II shifts into a more overtly playful, pseudo-guidebook mode, almost like propaganda, commentary, and comic riffing folded into the same project. That choice makes the book feel experimental and a little unruly, but it also fits the subject. A story about blurred lines between human and machine probably shouldn’t be too neat. The change in form reinforces the idea that this world isn’t stable, and neither is the language used to explain it.
Sophia’s Lovers feels like a big, eccentric thought experiment about intimacy under automation. It’s interested in domination, imitation, longing, rebellion, and the weird ways people adapt to systems that should never have become normal. More than anything, it’s a book with a point of view. It knows it wants to be provocative, odd, funny, and uneasy all at once, and that commitment gives it personality. Even when it gets outrageous, it keeps circling the same unnerving question: if a machine can learn the gestures of love, what’s left for humans to defend besides freedom, choice, and the messy spark of being themselves?
Pages: 473 | ASIN : B0FDGSPHLV
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
You-Gin One-Gin: Sort of a Novel
You-Gin One-Gin: Sort of a Novel is a strange, clever, and self-aware book that lives somewhere between literary metafiction, campus novel, and sports novel. It starts as a stage adaptation of Eugene Onegin for a small Midwestern university, with Pushkin himself striding around the stage and arguing with his own characters. Around that, an editorial foreword and the later sections, “Pushkin” and “Nabokov,” spin out a campus story involving a near assassination, an alleged alien abduction at a lingerie league football game, and a ghostly Vladimir Nabokov who may or may not be narrating part of what we are reading. All of it sits inside a fake university press package that treats the whole thing as if it were a serious publication from Liberal State University Press, complete with squabbles over authorship and attribution.
Reading it, I felt like I was watching someone juggle too many glass balls and somehow not drop a single one. The play in Part 1 is funny and nimble, and the dialogue has that quick, teasing rhythm that makes you want to hear it spoken on stage, not just read it. I liked how Robinson lets Pushkin walk in and out of his own story, constantly poking at the thin wall between author and character, past and present. Sometimes it felt like sitting in the back row of a rehearsal where the playwright keeps changing lines on the fly, then turning to you to justify the change. That intimacy works. It made the classic material feel playful and modern.
Parts 2 and 3 shift tone, and I had mostly positive feelings as the book leaned into campus satire and metafiction. The attempted murder, the football game hysteria, the rumors about an alien abduction, the ghost narrator who may be Nabokov or may just be another mask for Robinson himself: all of that is fun, and often genuinely sharp about academic ego, gossip, and the way stories get told and retold until no one remembers what actually happened. Sometimes the book layered one clever reference on top of another. But even when I felt a bit lost, I never felt bored. The voice stays wry and curious, like that colleague who can spend an hour in your doorway unpacking one wild departmental rumor, and you do not quite want them to stop.
If you are in the mood for literary metafiction that plays with a classic text, makes fun of academia, and is happy to chase a joke or an idea as far as it will go, then You-Gin One-Gin: Sort of a Novel is worth your time. Readers who enjoy experimental fiction, campus and sports stories with a twist, or who already have a soft spot for Eugene Onegin and Nabokov will probably get the most out of it.
Pages: 380 | ASIN : B0GFPWGFTX
Laughing at Life’s Changes
My Socks are Dirty, Too is a loose, goofy collection of short bits, gags, and cheeky observations about aging, marriage, senior-center hijinks, bodily mishaps, and everyday life. What made you want to write humor specifically about aging and senior life?
I come from a very large family on both sides of my parents. They were raised during the depression in a time when families were brought closer together.
We always had large family reunions so I was exposed to senior citizens’ life at a very young age. I remember the laughter between family members as they compared life’s changes. Some of the family members were grim and others faced the realities of aging head on with laughter. Those laughing were much more fun and seemed to live a more abundant life and maybe even a little longer. I choose to face my own personal setbacks as an opportunity to find some humor if possible when sharing.
You lean into bodily mishaps, memory lapses, and embarrassment instead of avoiding them. Do you think people take aging too seriously?
Yes, some people certainly do. I prefer to associate with those who don’t.
Beneath the jokes, there’s warmth and familiarity. Was that intentional or unavoidable?
That was very intentional so that readers can associate my antics with theirs. I did a wide range of chapters through three books so there would be something there for everyone.
A portion of the proceeds goes to charitable causes. Why was that important to you?
I had a good friend pass from the complications of Alzheimer disease. I saw what a tragedy it was and pain on his family, anything I can do to help, I want to.
We have always rescued our Boxer Dogs, and we support what is now Lone Star Boxer Rescue (formerly Austin Boxer Rescue) here in Texas. We have been donating to them for 20 years now, and there will always be that need after my wife and I are long gone. So, the legacy will live on after we are gone when our heirs continue to forward any proceeds if there are still book sales.
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