Blog Archives
Crimson Light: The Song of Immaru
Crimson Light: The Song of Immaru, by PJ Dudek, is a sprawling science fantasy novel that moves between Earth and Arvalast, blending dystopian surveillance, portal fantasy, spiritual warfare, and old-fashioned adventure. The story follows a large cast, including Allen, Liz, Miriam, Tarin, Abigail, Maddie, Gil, Ebe, Dralo, and others, as the light of Immaru becomes both a gift and a target. What makes the book interesting is how naturally it treats cosmic stakes and ordinary grief as part of the same world. A wedding, a game of cards, a police order, a forest battle, and a shadowy realm all matter here.
The book’s central image is light, not just as magic, but as guidance, comfort, warning, and burden. Gil’s advice to Allen captures the novel’s moral center: “Respect the light, and be wary. Let it guide you; avoid trying to guide it.” That idea runs through nearly every storyline. Characters are constantly tempted to force answers, protect people through control, or mistake power for calling. Dudek gives the light a sacred weight, but he also keeps it practical. It glows in jars, phials, lockets, and lanterns, sitting right beside coffee shops, drones, bots, and muddy forest roads.
The strongest parts of the novel come from its emotional grounding. Maddie’s grief over Gras, Allen’s tenderness toward Liz, Miriam’s loneliness, and Tarin’s uneasy role as a warrior all give the bigger mythology something human to hold onto. Miriam’s arc is especially affecting because her fear, anger, and longing for Abigail make her more than just another chosen figure. The book spends real time with people after loss, and that patience gives the battles more meaning when they arrive.
Dudek also has a real appetite for scale. Arvalast’s forests, Macalum’s politics, the drilockk threat, the Vulgheid, the mysterious Prince, and Earth’s militarized systems all feel connected by the end. The reveal of Simon as something far more dangerous than a government official gives the Earth plot a sharp jolt, especially when he declares, “I am the Prince of this world. And I am here to protect my throne.” That moment pulls the book’s spiritual and sci-fi threads together in a way that feels bold and strange in the best sense.
Crimson Light is an ambitious, heartfelt continuation of a much larger saga. It’s a book about people carrying light through systems, forests, memories, and nightmares that want to swallow them whole. Its cast is wide and its mythology is dense, but its heart is easy to locate: friendship, sacrifice, faith, and the painful work of choosing courage when the next step is unclear. By the time the epilogue points Iris toward another dangerous journey, the story feels less like it’s ending than opening another door.
A Shroud Undone
A Shroud Undone by A.M. Woodbury is a dark epic fantasy novel about a world trapped in an ancient, exhausting war between humans and the Sylphar, with the mysterious Stillight sitting at the center of both faith and bloodshed. The story follows Theron, a haunted hunter with a hidden past, as he is pulled from the quiet hardship of Wyrnhollow back into the machinery of war. What begins as a tale of survival and reluctant duty grows into something larger, touching on old gods, broken belief, impossible choices, and the terrible cost of trying to end a conflict that has shaped generations.
What struck me first was the weight of the writing. This is not a light fantasy adventure, and it does not pretend to be. Woodbury writes battle with grit and patience, letting the mud, ash, cold, and blood pile up until the reader feels worn down alongside the characters. The violence has impact because it is rarely treated as spectacle alone. Even when the action is intense, the book keeps circling back to grief, memory, and the small human moments that survive inside chaos. A joke between soldiers. A shared meal. Someone trying to keep another person alive for one more day. Those details give the story its pulse.
I also found myself drawn to the author’s choices around perspective. Theron is the emotional center, but the book becomes more interesting because it does not let only one side own the pain. Nyra Draeven, on the Sylphar side, gives the war another face, and that choice keeps the story from becoming too simple. I liked that the book asks what happens when both sides have suffered long enough to believe their cruelty is necessary. The pacing is deliberate, which suits the novel’s grim atmosphere and gives the emotional moments room to land. Rather than rushing from one battle to the next, the book lets the sorrow and violence settle in, making the war feel like a wound that keeps reopening instead of just a backdrop for heroic action.
A Shroud Undone will appeal most to readers who like their epic fantasy bleak, layered, and morally uneasy. I would recommend it to fans of stories about reluctant warriors, ancient powers, religious mystery, and battles where victory never feels clean. For readers who enjoy a grounded and bruising fantasy novel with a strong sense of history and consequence, this is a thoughtful and immersive start to A Fractured Balance.
Pages: 382 | ASIN: B0GNDJ459G
Dark Humor and Dread
The Muck follows a ghostwriter hired to write the origin story of a crypto magnate that turns out to be a horror story about pollution and power. The Maw feels almost like a character in its own right. How did you build its atmosphere?
I researched what a chemical plant of that era would have looked like and the sorts of buildings and processes involved, as well as what goes into a data center or bitcoin mining operation of today. But really I was aiming for a ruined Gothic castle/cathedral vibe. The Gothic is one of my favorite genres, and so that was a natural fit.
The novel balances dark humor, dread, and social commentary. How did you maintain that balance?
Seems to me that any social commentary these days is bound to be laced with dark humor and dread. I think a lot of what we consider “dark humor” comes from realizing that this fantastical or horrible thing we’re reading or watching is actually on some levels intimately familiar.
If readers look beyond the horror elements, what human truth do you hope they find?
Glenn, the ghostwriter who is lured into the Gothic castle, is an ordinary man with failings and debts, financial and familial. The divorce that he didn’t want is just about final, and his relationship with his daughter is fraught. Brad, the CEO, tempts him with money and status, and he latches onto this as the solution to his problems, but at the risk of his life and his soul. In the end, it’s the women in his life–his daughter, his ex-wife, the Airbnb host he meets when he arrives–who keep him at least somewhat anchored to reality and morality.
Author Links: Facebook | YouTube | Website
When tech CEO Brad Thorsen offers Glenn Hurst six figures to ghostwrite his “origin story,” Glenn jumps at the chance. Thorsen will be difficult. His ambition is bottomless. But Glenn’s a professional—he can handle one narcissistic tech-bro if it means salvaging his career.
Thorsen’s converted an abandoned chemical plant in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia into a sprawling data center—thousands of servers now hum in halls that once produced persistent blistering agents. Plagued by accidents and toxic spills for more than a century, the factory was finally abandoned—but Thorsen sees only opportunity. When Glenn mutters “the pollution IS the product” the CEO’s eyes light up: “I think we have a title for our book.”
Glenn tells himself he’s documenting, not endorsing. But the longer he stays, the harder it becomes to know where Brad’s story ends and Glenn’s collaboration begins.
And there’s something wrong with Thorsen. With the people around him. Something Glenn can’t quite put his finger on.
Like an itch he just can’t scratch.
A neo-Gothic psychological horror-thriller about greed, complicity, and the people and other… creatures… that get under your skin.
The Unexpected Position of Being Loved
The Witching-Hour Lovers follows a couple with an emotionally-charged connection built around the fragile hope that they will someday be together. Where did the idea behind this novel come from?
The Witching-Hour Lovers grew out of a lifelong fascination with people. I’ve always been an observer. I watch expressions, moods, smiles, silences, and I find myself wondering what lies beneath them. What drives people? What are they longing for? How does love shape the choices they make, and the lives they ultimately lead?
I also drew upon my own relationship with love. For much of my life, I believed it was something that happened to other people, not to me. Then I found myself in the unexpected position of being loved, or at least being told I was loved. My instinct was to resist it. I argued against it, questioned it, and looked for reasons why it couldn’t be true. Eventually, I stopped fighting and allowed myself to experience it.
What I discovered was both beautiful and painful. I came to realise that pure love, the kind that asks for honesty, vulnerability, and courage, is often far more difficult to carry than we imagine. Modern life is full of obligations, fears, expectations, and compromises, and sometimes love alone is not enough to overcome them.
That tension became the heart of the novel. I wanted to explore what happens when two people share a profound emotional connection but find themselves trapped between what they feel and what they are able to choose. At its core, The Witching-Hour Lovers is an exploration of hope, longing, and the difficult truth that it is often not love that breaks us, but hope.
Much of the novel’s emotional weight comes from texts, voice notes, missed opportunities, and fleeting encounters. Why were those small moments so important to the story?
Because life is often made up of small moments rather than grand gestures. We grow up on stories that tell us love is defined by dramatic declarations and happy endings, but in reality, relationships are often built in the spaces between those moments. A text message received at exactly the right time, a voice note replayed over and over, a fleeting encounter that lingers in your thoughts for days, or a conversation that never quite happens. These seemingly insignificant moments can carry enormous emotional weight because they become the places where hope lives.
I wanted to capture the reality of modern relationships, where technology allows us to be constantly connected and yet still profoundly distant from one another. A person can be only a message away and still feel unreachable. Sometimes a few words on a screen can make your heart soar, while silence can be deafening. The small moments were important because they reveal character. They show what people do, rather than what they say they will do. They expose longing, hesitation, fear, and vulnerability in ways that grand romantic gestures often cannot.
Just as importantly, I never wanted there to be a villain in this story. Real life is rarely that simple. Most people are carrying histories, responsibilities, fears, loyalties, wounds, and obligations that shape the choices they make. Sometimes those things become a brick wall through which love simply cannot pass, no matter how genuine the feelings, how intense the longing, or how devastating the consequences.
For me, that is where the real heartbreak lies. Not in a lack of love, but in the painful reality that love alone cannot always overcome the barriers people carry within themselves or the circumstances surrounding them.
Those small moments became the emotional heartbeat of The Witching-Hour Lovers because they are the moments most readers will recognise from their own lives. The story asks a difficult question: what happens when two people genuinely love each other, but life gives them no way to cross the distance between them?
Did you ever find yourself sympathizing more with one character than the other?
No, and that was very important to me as I was writing the novel. I felt the pain of both characters. Sophie’s, because she never expected to experience this kind of love, and Alan’s because he found it and wanted to love Sophie in all the ways that mattered, but life itself became the barrier.
There were certainly moments when I felt the pain of one character more acutely than the other, and that is because I was Sophie in a previous chapter of my life, but I never viewed either of them as right or wrong, because, Alan to me, did love and in my own chapter, I knew there was love, but responsibility and duty was the winner. One of the great mistakes we make when looking at relationships is assuming there must be a hero and a villain, a person who loves more and a person who loves less. Real life is rarely that clear-cut.
For me, Alan’s final unsent text says everything. He writes that he needed to keep his heart. The connection he shared with Sophie was his heart, yet in choosing duty and responsibility, he ultimately broke his own heart. That felt profoundly human to me. I do have enormous sympathy for both characters because I understood what each of them was carrying. One is living with longing and uncertainty, while the other is trying to navigate responsibilities, fears, loyalties, and the consequences of choices already made. Neither position is easy, and both come with their own form of suffering.
As the author, I was less interested in deciding who deserved sympathy and more interested in exploring the human cost of impossible circumstances. Sometimes people hurt each other not because they lack love, but because they are trapped by the realities of their lives and by the limitations of what they are capable of giving. If I sympathised with anything, it was the tragedy of two people who genuinely care for one another and yet cannot find a way to bridge the distance between them. That felt far more interesting to me than assigning blame.
I wanted readers to come away recognising pieces of themselves in both characters. Depending on where someone is in their own life, they may identify with Sophie, Alan, or perhaps both. To me, that is where empathy begins.
What are you exploring in your writing now that you didn’t explore in this novel?
This novel explores longing, hope, and the emotional space between what we feel and what we are able to choose. Much of the novel asks what happens when love exists but circumstances prevent it from being fully lived. What interests me now is what comes after that. I find myself increasingly drawn to questions of healing, resilience, and identity. How do people rebuild themselves after loss? What parts of us survive heartbreak, and what parts are transformed by it? How do we learn to carry grief without allowing it to define us?
I am also interested in exploring love from different perspectives. The Witching-Hour Lovers focuses on the ache of possibility and the tension of what cannot be. In my future writing, I would like to explore what happens when people stop waiting for life to change and begin actively choosing themselves.
I will always remain fascinated by human connection in all its forms. I suspect I will always write about love in one way or another, but I am becoming increasingly interested in courage, self-discovery, and the quiet strength it takes to move forward when the story you imagined for yourself is no longer possible.
Poetry has always been at the heart of my writing. Long before I wrote this novel, I wrote poetry from a deeply personal place, drawing upon emotion, memory, and the complexities of the human heart. In fact, I was writing a poem when the words kept going and going, and I realised this story needed its own book.
Some of my poetry can be found on AllPoetry.com. I suspect that, for a little while at least, I will return to poetry as a way of processing and releasing many of the emotions that have found their way into my writing over the years, while I continue to discover where my fiction wants to take me next.
For me, writing has always been about understanding people. The questions may change, but the curiosity remains the same. There are countless fabulous, heartfelt, funny, sad, and painful stories all around us. Just take a long walk along the Embankment and pay attention to the people you pass or encounter. We all have a story.
Author Links: GoodReads | X | Facebook
The Wonders of the Adirondacks
A Postcard From the Adirondacks follows a man who embarks on a strange Adirondack adventure where journalism, folklore, philosophy, and canine loyalty collide. Where did the idea for this novel come from?
The novel began with the experience of canine companionship amidst the wonders of the Adirondacks, both real and as imagined. It is a place where you do talk with your dog and where the sasquatch exists. Both things being matters of belief, like any religion. The novel purports to be true fiction, and makes an effort to explain to the reader the foundations for such truth, and a reason to believe.
The novel blends adventure, satire, folklore, philosophy, and fantasy. Did you always envision it as a genre-crossing story?
Yes. The truth of fiction is the truth of imagination, and that blending of literaturary styles is the source of that truth. That is why you often hear it said that the truth is stranger than fiction.
Why do you think the bond between humans and dogs is so powerful in literature and life?
The simple, scientific answer is oxytocin. As explained in the chapter that discusses the domestication of dogs, oxytocin functions as a neurotransmitter. It modifies neural circuits to increase feelings of trust, empathy, and social connection. Those things are what the relationship between humans and dogs is all about, especially to the extent that they embody affection. Snuggle with a puppy and experience that symbiotic relationship. You will be glad that you did.
If readers could carry away one idea from the novel, what would you most hope it would be?
To keep on believing in the world of imagination.
The Light Reapers: A Good Day to Die
The Light Reapers: A Good Day to Die, by Gary Hickman, is a post-apocalyptic military horror thriller that follows Priest and the Light Reapers as they face a world overrun by infected monsters, ruthless human enemies, and the rising threat of the Trinity, three intelligent, terrifying beings with plans that reach far beyond simple survival. The story moves from brutal rescue missions and underground battles to safe zones that may not be safe at all. At its core, though, this is a book about loyalty. Who gets saved. Who gets left behind. And what it costs to keep fighting when the world keeps giving you reasons to stop.
Hickman writes like he wants the reader strapped into the passenger seat of an armored vehicle with no seatbelt. The action comes fast, loud, and bloody, but there is more going on here than gunfire and monsters. Priest is written as a man shaped by rage, grief, and purpose, and that mix gives the book its emotional weight. He’s not soft, and the story never pretends he is. Still, the quieter moments, especially the ones built around Dora, Doc, Vivian, Lia, and the larger Reaper family, give the violence somewhere to land. I liked that. Without those moments, the book could have become one long firefight. Instead, it has breath between the explosions.
Hickman’s choices are bold, sometimes harsh, and often intentionally uncomfortable. This isn’t a gentle post-apocalyptic novel. The horror is physical, but it is also moral. The monsters are frightening, yet the human betrayals can feel even uglier. I found myself thinking a lot about how the book treats obedience, power, and protection. The Trinity wants control. The Reapers survive because they choose each other. That contrast works well. The dialogue can be blunt and rough around the edges, but it fits the world and the people living in it. These are soldiers, survivors, killers, parents, lovers, and friends trying to hold a line in a ruined world. They don’t speak in polished speeches. They snap, joke, curse, grieve, and keep moving.
I would recommend The Light Reapers: A Good Day to Die to readers who enjoy gritty military science fiction, post-apocalyptic horror, and action-heavy thrillers with a strong found-family thread. It will especially appeal to readers who like their heroes damaged but loyal, their villains monstrous in more ways than one, and their survival stories soaked in danger from the first page to the last. This is a violent, emotional, high-stakes genre novel, and it fully commits to the brutal, high-stakes story it sets out to tell.
Pages: 381 | ASIN : B0GZZ51ZBW
Architect: The Goodpasture Chronicles (Book 3)
Architect by R.J. Halbert is a supernatural fantasy novel with strong threads of mystery, family drama, faith, and time travel. As the third book in The Goodpasture Chronicles, it follows the Keane family after Zach returns from an ancient world, while Akolo’s story continues across years, grief, love, and strange divine purpose. The book moves between the haunted pull of the Goodpasture house and a much older world of temples, artifacts, kings, and impossible choices. At its heart, though, this is a story about home. Not just the house you live in, but the people, memories, wounds, and hopes that make a place matter.
I enjoyed the way Halbert lets the supernatural sit right beside the ordinary. One moment, I was reading about portals, ancient power, storms, and voices in the wind. The next, I was with a family trying to eat breakfast, survive school, clean up a chicken coop, or figure out how to talk to a teenager who feels deeply hurt. That balance gives the book its warmth. The fantasy elements are big, but the emotions are close to the ground. I also liked how the writing gives different characters room to be confused. Nobody has all the answers, and that feels honest. Zach is trying to piece together memories. Ariel is angry and scared. Lyana and Ian are doing their best while clearly not knowing what “best” even means anymore. That uncertainty makes the story feel lived-in instead of staged.
I was also struck by the author’s choice to build the book around legacy. Akolo’s long journey could have been only a fantasy device, but it becomes something sadder and richer. Immortality is not treated like a prize. It’s heavy. It costs him. It stretches love and loss over time until both become almost unbearable. That gave the book more weight than I expected. The faith language is direct, but the sincerity worked for me more often than not. The book is not trying to be detached or ironic. It believes in healing, restoration, and purpose, and it says so plainly. There is something refreshing about that.
I would recommend Architect most to readers who enjoy faith-centered supernatural fantasy, especially stories where mystery and suspense are tied to family history and emotional healing. It will probably land best for those who have read the earlier books, since this feels like a closing movement in a larger piece of music. Readers who like time travel, ancient history, haunted houses, hidden identities, and redemptive endings will find a lot to enjoy here. I came away feeling that the book is less about solving every strange event than about learning to trust that broken stories can still be gathered into something whole.
Pages: 258 | ASIN: B0GXNW6X9V
Inspired the Same Love of Reading
Journey to Nirisia follows a quiet fourteen-year-old girl whose summer job quickly turns into a journey to a magical world. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
My passion and drive comes from the desire to place compelling books in the hands of an Upper Middle-Grade audience. I write stories that challenge and engage young readers while honoring their intelligence and curiosity. My aim is to inspire the same love of reading that shaped my own childhood.
Many readers will recognize Emma’s anxiety and uncertainty. How did you approach writing those aspects of her character?
Everyone experiences anxiety and uncertainty at some point in life, especially during the teenage years. My stories feature characters who are imperfect—and who are not expected to be anything else. Through their journeys, I hope readers recognize just how awkward, challenging, and complicated life can be. More importantly, I want them to understand that it is perfectly fine to be different, to have fears, and to experience emotions that take time and courage to navigate.
Were there scenes or characters that surprised you while writing the book?
Great question. Truthfully, my answer is no. I knew exactly who I wanted each character to be from the start. Emma, the introvert, is wonderfully flawed, and I wanted her journey to begin that way—filled with doubt, insecurity, and moments of indecision. After all, regardless of age, we all experience these feelings from time to time.
If my writing can make readers think, ‘that’s exactly how I feel,’ then I’ve accomplished my goal. My hope is that my audience sees themselves in these characters and realize they are not alone in their struggles, fears, or uncertainties.
Can you give us a glimpse inside the next installment of this series? Where will it take readers?
I would love to tell you about The Library Between Worlds: The House That Lies. If you love mysteries, this one is for you.
The story summary is: Dunhallow is cursed. Its residents are vanishing without a trace, and though all believe that Ashford House is the cause, none have lived to prove it.
But when Emma, Faylen, and Cedar find themselves in this spooky town, they set out to be the first ones to return with answers. And when someone close to them goes missing, waiting is no longer an option. They must uncover the dark secret hiding behind Ashford House’s walls—or sealed away in its basement.
Can the trio solve the mystery that an entire town cannot, before Ashford House claims them too?
Author Links: Amazon | Website
5 Star review / Emily-Jane Hills Orford for Reader’s Favorite*
Emma has always preferred the company of books over people. She believed in the magic within their pages, never suspecting the worlds they held truly existed. Now she is about to discover just how real those worlds are.
A dark force known as Eraser is ravaging countless realms, destroying their stories one by one. With each tale he consumes, he moves closer to unraveling reality itself.
To stop him, Emma must find the Wizard’s Crystal, a magical prison powerful enough to contain him. If she fails, every world ever written could vanish, leaving no stories left to save.
