Blog Archives
Nero’s Nile
Nero’s Nile, by Rowan O’Neill, is a historical fiction adventure that follows Emperor Nero’s obsession with discovering the source of the Nile. To carry out that ambition, he draws Titus Statilius Taurus back from the quiet life he has earned and sends him into Egypt and beyond, while Rome itself rots under ambition, violence, grief, and spectacle. The novel moves between imperial politics and expeditionary danger, mixing Roman history, Egyptian myth, and supernatural menace into a fast, dramatic story about power and the price of being useful to people who see the world as something to own.
What stood out to me first was the pace. This book doesn’t linger at the doorway. It kicks it open. O’Neill writes in bold strokes, and the result is a novel that often feels closer to a sword-and-sandals epic than a restrained historical drama. Battles, assassinations, betrayals, crocodile attacks, ancient temples, and political murders arrive with steady force. I liked that confidence. The writing sometimes favors impact over subtlety, especially in the dialogue, where characters often say exactly what they mean and say it loudly. That can make some scenes feel theatrical rather than natural. But honestly, that theatrical quality also fits Nero. His world is all performance, blood, gold, and applause, so the heightened style makes a strange kind of sense.
I was most interested in the author’s choice to make the Nile expedition more than a geographic mystery. The book treats the river almost like a living border between history and myth. Titus becomes the steadier center of the novel, a soldier who wants peace but keeps getting pulled toward other men’s dreams of glory. Nero, meanwhile, is written as both ridiculous and dangerous, which can, at times, be a hard balance to hold. He is vain, childish, cruel, and sometimes oddly sad. I found that mix compelling, even when the character work leans broad. The historical fiction genre gives the novel its bones, but the adventure and supernatural elements give it its pulse. By the time the darker mythic material moves closer to the surface, the book has shifted from Roman intrigue into something stranger and more feverish.
I would recommend Nero’s Nile to readers who enjoy historical fiction that is energetic, dramatic, and unafraid to bend history for the sake of the story. If you like ancient Rome, dangerous quests, myth-soaked adventure, and a plot that keeps throwing new hazards into the river, they will probably have a good time with it. I did. The book is a torchlit march into empire, obsession, and chaos, and it knows exactly the kind of spectacle it wants to be.
Pages: 269 | ASIN : B0GY27MQ2B
Witness to Tribulation
Liz Finnegan’s Witness to Tribulation is a reflective historical novel about inheritance, grief, and the strange pull of Gettysburg. The story follows Emily Tomaso, a young woman who leaves a tense home life behind after inheriting her grandmother’s family house in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. What begins as a fresh start becomes something deeper when Emily finds an old Civil War diary and starts sensing that the past in this town is still very much alive.
The book blends family drama, romance, history, and ghost story in a way that feels personal rather than flashy. Emily’s connection with Peter Sanders gives the story warmth, but the heart of the novel is really her growing relationship with the people who came before her. The Civil War material is woven into the plot through Gettysburg itself, through the diary, and through the emotional residue left behind by ordinary people who had to survive extraordinary suffering.
Finnegan’s strongest idea is that history doesn’t stay sealed away in textbooks. It moves through families, houses, memories, and even silence. That idea comes through beautifully in the repeated use of candles, bells, old rooms, and remembered voices. One line captures the spirit of the town especially well: “If you were to put a candle in every window in this town, it still wouldn’t be enough to acknowledge all of the suffering.” That sense of reverence gives the novel much of its emotional weight.
Emily’s journey also works because it’s grounded in everyday hurt. Her strained relationship with her mother, Mandy, gives the story an intimate tension that balances the larger Civil War history. As Emily uncovers the pain carried by her ancestors, she also begins to understand her own family with more tenderness.
Witness to Tribulation is a heartfelt novel about memory, forgiveness, and the ways a place can shape the people who live there. Finnegan writes Gettysburg as more than a historic site; it becomes a living space where sorrow, faith, love, and reconciliation meet. Readers who enjoy family-centered historical fiction with a spiritual atmosphere will find this book thoughtful, sincere, and easy to settle into.
Pages: 324 | ISBN : 978-1637777749
An Imprint of Evil and Other Hauntings
Stephen Tallevi’s An Imprint of Evil and Other Hauntings is a compact collection of ten horror stories built around cursed objects, old sins, hungry gods, occult bargains, and people who make one terrible choice too many. The book has the feel of classic ghost and weird fiction, with each story rooted in a specific time and place, from Manchester in 1831 to the Florida Keys in 1964, Chicago in 1905, and Muskoka Lakes in 1929. That historical spread gives the collection a pleasing variety, while the tone stays consistent: polished, eerie, and quietly wicked.
I enjoyed how often the horror grows out of desire. Mary’s longing in “Love is Blind,” George’s greed in “Pearly Whites,” Cathers’s ambition in “The Death God,” and the community’s bargain in “The Barn” all lead characters into darkness with their eyes wide open. These aren’t random hauntings so much as moral traps. Tallevi has a knack for letting people talk themselves into the unforgivable, then watching the supernatural world meet them halfway.
The stories also move at a brisk, readable pace. Most begin with a familiar situation, such as a reunion, an expedition, a country visit, a carnival, or a marriage under strain, and then tighten the screws until the final turn lands. “Idol of the Deep” is especially effective as an adventure story that slowly becomes something stranger and more fatal, while “Hands of Fate” adds a detective-story rhythm to the collection. The line “There is no death god in this cave, only death” captures the book’s taste for irony, where the supernatural and human cruelty often blur into one another.
Tallevi’s best moments come when he lets a simple image do the work: a wax doll, a black idol, stained hands, a scarecrow in a storm, a barn door that won’t open. The prose is clear and atmospheric without getting bogged down, and the collection has a campfire-story quality that makes it easy to keep turning pages. Even the brief “Summer Blood” has a playful bite. That story’s mix of menace and dark humor showcases the author’s personality.
An Imprint of Evil and Other Hauntings is an entertaining horror collection with a strong affection for old-school supernatural storytelling. It’s full of cursed inheritances, cruel bargains, and endings that snap shut like a trap. Readers who enjoy concise, atmospheric tales with a macabre sense of justice will find a lot to enjoy here, especially in the way Tallevi turns ordinary human weakness into something ghostly, grotesque, and strangely satisfying.
Pages: 132 | ASIN : B0G5LVNKF6
Skepticism and Belief
Reflections in the Dark follows a haunted academic and a Chicago homicide detective as they investigate ritualistic murders tied to mirrors, fractured identity, and a terrifying reality pressing in from beyond the known world. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The inspiration really came from wanting to merge two types of stories I’ve always loved: surreal, cosmic horror in the vein of Twin Peaks or The X-Files, and grounded noir detective fiction like the work of Raymond Chandler.
Early on, I had a very clear image in my head: it was essentially Fox Mulder paired with Philip Marlowe. I wanted that contrast: a straight-laced, reality-driven investigator encountering cases that gradually become stranger and more unexplainable, eventually drawing in someone who’s open to the paranormal, other dimensions, and the unknown.
That push and pull between skepticism and belief became the foundation of the story. It’s something The X-Files did so well, and it creates a natural tension that lets the mystery evolve from grounded crime into something much more unsettling and cosmic.
As the story developed, that dynamic evolved into Reed and Maria. I shifted the noir detective role into Maria partly because I wanted a male-female pairing, but also because it strengthened that contrast—two people approaching the same reality from completely different perspectives, forced to confront something neither of them can fully explain.
Reed Ashland and Detective Maria Voss bring different kinds of damage to the story. Which character came to you first?
That’s a tough one, because they really arrived together conceptually. From the beginning, I knew the story needed two leads, two perspectives colliding.
That said, I actually started writing Reed first. The opening chapters came from his point of view, and right away, his voice was very disjointed, surreal, and intentionally unstructured. That was always the goal with him; his experience of reality is fractured, but as I was writing, I realized pretty quickly that if the entire novel lived in that space, it would be difficult to anchor.
That’s when Maria really came into focus.
Her storyline became the grounding force of the book. While Reed drifts further into the strange and otherworldly, Maria operates in a much more linear, procedural way—investigating bodies, following evidence, moving step by step through a case. That structure gave the story a necessary through line and allowed Reed’s more abstract descent to have contrast and context.
So while Reed was technically first on the page, Maria’s side of the story became complete first. She’s the lens that holds everything together, and the balance between the two is what gives the story its shape.
What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?
At the beginning, I honestly just wanted to write a compelling horror-mystery, something that captured the feeling I got personally from works like House of Leaves, The X-Files, and Twin Peaks. That sense of unease, mystery, and something just beyond comprehension.
But as I wrote the book, the thematic core shifted more toward the characters themselves.
What really interested me was exploring how people carry damage: grief, trauma, unresolved questions, and how that shapes who they are. Reed and Maria, on the surface, can feel like familiar archetypes, but I wanted to push beyond that and show that there’s always something deeper underneath. People aren’t as simple as they first appear.
That idea: that we often misjudge others based on surface-level impressions, became really important to me. You meet someone and think you understand them, but the more you learn, the more complicated they become. I wanted the characters to reflect that reality.
So at its core, the book is less about solving a mystery and more about how these characters navigate their own internal fractures. It’s about how we carry our past with us, how it influences our decisions, and how it quietly shapes the paths our lives take.
What is the next book that you are working on, and when will it be available?
Right now, I have a few projects in motion. The closest to release is a novella titled Viscera Varnish, which is essentially finished and just going through final cleanup. It’s a transgressive, art-driven horror story, and the plan is to release it in early summer.
I’m also in the middle of writing another novella, currently titled Panspermia. That’s just a working title and will most likely change, but that one leans more into sci-fi horror, drawing inspiration from shows like The X-Files and the broader ancient-aliens mythology. If everything stays on track, I’m aiming for a late summer or early fall release.
Beyond that, my next major focus will be the sequel to Reflections in the Dark. It’s still early, but my goal is to have Book Two out within about a year, tentatively targeting early 2027.
I also have several short stories appearing in upcoming anthologies this year. One is a suburban horror piece titled Night Whispers, another is a folk horror story called The Keepers, and a third, Ascended Infinity, explores the idea of uncovering hidden truths. Final anthology titles and release dates are still to be announced.
Overall, the goal is to keep a steady stream of work coming and continuing to build out this world while also exploring different corners of horror along the way.
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Across town, Dr. Reed Ashland wakes to fractured memories and impossible visions staring back at him from every mirror he passes. Once a respected philosophy professor, Reed is now a disgraced academic spiraling through grief, alcoholism, and the growing certainty that something is watching from the other side of the glass.
When Voss and Ashland are drawn into an uneasy partnership, their investigation quickly slips beyond logic. Victims appear who should not exist. Reflections behave independently. Messages surface where no human hand could have written them. And the killer they are hunting does not seem bound by the rules of a single reality.
All paths lead to a phenomenon Reed knows too well but fears to name: the Elsewhere Fold, a place that exists between worlds where memory, identity, and consciousness bleed into one another. A place that remembers everyone who enters it and does not always let them leave.
As the boundary between the Fold and the waking world begins to erode, Voss and Ashland must confront the versions of themselves reflected in the dark. Some familiar. Some monstrous. Some terrifyingly true. Because the killer they seek may not be entirely human, and if they fail, the Fold will not remain on the other side of the mirror.
Reflections in the Dark is a gripping blend of crime thriller, psychological horror, and surreal mystery that explores fractured identity, existential dread, and the darkness waiting behind every reflection. Fans of Night Film, True Detective, and the dreamlike terror of David Lynch will feel right at home.
Reflections in the Dark: A Horror-Noir
Jason Garman’s Reflections in the Dark is a horror-noir that treats reality like a crime scene and every mirror like a witness that knows more than it should. The book opens on ideas of consciousness, reflection, and fractured identity, then threads those ideas through a story that moves between police procedural, cosmic nightmare, and grief-soaked character study. Reed Ashland, the burned-out academic drawn toward impossible visions, and Detective Maria Voss, the sharp Chicago homicide detective trying to make sense of ritualistic murders, give the novel its two strongest currents. Together they make the book feel grounded and unstable at the same time, which is exactly the right tension for a story this interested in perception.
The author doesn’t treat the horror as decoration. The horror is the book’s language. It shows up in the imagery, the rhythms of the sentences, and the way ordinary spaces keep turning strange. A bedroom, a precinct, a parking garage, a hospital room, all of them become charged with the sense that something is leaning in from just outside the known world. There’s a line early on, “Reality is a story badly translated from another dimension,” and it works because it feels like a mission statement for the whole novel. That’s the kind of book this is: moody, philosophical, and deeply committed to making disorientation feel intimate rather than abstract.
It’s also a character-driven book, which gives the weirdness some real emotional weight. Reed could’ve been just the classic unraveling visionary, but he’s more damaged and human than that. Maria could’ve been just the hard-edged detective, but she carries fatigue, intelligence, and tenderness in a way that keeps her from ever feeling stock. Even the supporting relationships help round out the novel’s world, especially the glimpses of family life, old love, and accumulated loss. Those parts matter because they keep the book from floating off into pure abstraction. When the story says, “We live inside ambiguity’s prison,” it isn’t only talking about metaphysics. It’s also talking about grief, guilt, and the way people keep moving through lives they don’t fully understand.
The prose is rich, stylized, and often intentionally feverish. Garman clearly loves image-making, and when he’s in rhythm, the book can feel like it’s casting a spell. This is a novel that wants you to sink into its atmosphere more than race through its plot mechanics. The procedural spine is there, and the mystery keeps tightening, but the real pull is the mood of it all: the cracked clocks, the broken mirrors, the recurring 3:33, the sense that language itself is starting to warp. I kept coming back to how confidently the novel blends the hard-boiled and the surreal. It’s not shy about being strange, and that confidence gives it personality.
Reflections in the Dark feels less like a simple whodunit and more like a descent into a worldview, one where identity, memory, and evil keep slipping out of their usual shapes. It’s a book that wants to unsettle you, but it also wants to linger with damaged people trying to make meaning out of what’s happened to them. That combination gives it its own pulse. This is a debut that knows its obsessions and leans into them fully: mirrors, thresholds, sorrow, perception, and the awful possibility that something might be looking back. For readers who like horror with noir bones and a surreal edge, this one has a lot to chew on.
Pages: 288 | ASIN : B0GSLH62NF
Coexistence and Domination
Black Forest Protocol is an alternate-history thriller in which a UFO crash in Nazi Germany forces an SS officer to confront the gulf between domination and preservation when the regime tries to weaponize a sacred alien presence. What sparked the idea of placing a first-contact story inside Nazi Germany?
There had been reports and a number of journals/books dedicated to the Black Forest crash in 1936. This is roughly 10 years before the Roswell incident. Through my research on the rise of the Nazi regime, German manufacturing made extensive technological leaps from 1936 through 1939, prior to the invasion of Poland. It mirrored the technological leaps the US made post-Roswell. I used creative license to involve the Nazi SS and advanced technology/alien abilities that would have been used to reshape a totalitarian regime reality to fit ideology.
How did you approach writing Ernst Falk so that his moral awakening felt gradual and believable rather than heroic from the start?
The key was to start with competence instead of conscience. Falk is intelligent, disciplined, and emotionally detached. He isn’t written as a monster or a secret hero—he’s a professional who follows systems without questioning them. That makes his starting point believable and grounded. From there, I avoided any sudden “moral epiphany.” Instead, his change happens through accumulated friction: small moments that feel off, observations he can’t fully explain, and emotional reactions he initially suppresses. Importantly, he fails repeatedly. He hesitates, rationalizes, and makes the wrong choices even after he begins to feel doubt. That delay is what makes the awakening feel real—he understands before he acts. Finally, his awakening comes with cost, not reward. He loses certainty, identity, and alignment with the system that once defined him. He doesn’t become heroic—he becomes unable to ignore the truth.
The aliens feel mournful, vulnerable, and almost sacred. What did you want them to represent beyond their role in the plot?
The aliens were meant to represent a form of intelligence untouched by human corruption, that is something gentle, restrained, and morally unbroken. Their vulnerability highlights the contrast between coexistence and domination, making humanity’s instinct to control feel invasive rather than justified. They serve as a mirror to Falk and the reader, suggesting that intelligence doesn’t have to lead to cruelty—and that what we often call progress may actually be a loss of something more sacred.
How did you balance the book’s eldritch atmosphere and allegorical reach with the historical weight of writing about the Third Reich?
I balanced the eldritch atmosphere with the historical weight of the Third Reich by keeping the human reality grounded and specific, never abstracting or stylizing the regime’s brutality, while letting the cosmic elements emerge as a destabilizing force around it. The horror doesn’t replace history; it intensifies it, exposing the dangers of ideology, control, and moral certainty when confronted with the unknowable. By anchoring the story in authentic human behavior and consequence, the allegory expands the meaning without diminishing the reality.
Author Links: GoodReads | Website | Amazon
SS officer Ernst Falk is stationed on a quiet rural post when the forest itself seems to recoil, where animals vanish, the air vibrates, and the night splits open with a light no human technology should be able to produce. By dawn, a seamless metallic object lies embedded in the earth, warping the trees around it and defying every known law of physics.
It is not wreckage.
It is not dead.
And it is not alone.
Hidden beneath the pines, Falk and a small team of scientists discover survivors, beings not of this world, wounded and terrified. What should have become humanity’s first moment of cosmic contact instead becomes a nightmare of secrecy and ambition. The Nazi regime seals the forest, erases witnesses, and delivers the discovery into the hands of the SS and the Ahnenerbe, who see not life but opportunity.
As alien technology is dismantled and alien biology harvested, a terrifying project takes shape: the Blackforest Protocol. Under the direction of fanatical ideologues, the crash is transformed into a weapons program, a genetic experiment, and a propaganda miracle meant to fuse extraterrestrial power with Nazi myth.
But the forest is changing.
The survivors are not silent.
And Falk begins to realize the visitors did not come as conquerors-but as explorers, carrying knowledge that was never meant to be bent into instruments of domination.
Decades later, the consequences of what happened in the Black Forest resurface, dragging the modern world into a buried legacy of stolen technology, erased crimes, and a truth powerful enough to destabilize history itself.
Blending historical horror, science fiction, and psychological suspense, Blackforest Protocol is a chilling alternate-history thriller about first contact gone wrong, where humanity’s greatest discovery becomes its most unforgivable crime, and the forest that witnessed it refuses to forget.
Alive and Forgotten
The Lights of Greyfare follows a burned-out journalist who goes to a small seaside town on assignment, and she discovers the small town is hiding terrifying secrets. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
Greyfare began as a place in my imagination long before it had a name. I’ve always been fascinated by towns that seem both alive and forgotten, where the fog feels like another resident and silence carries its own folklore. I wanted a setting that could reflect Katherine Calder’s unraveling, a place where her grief and addiction would meet an environment that seemed to breathe and press back against her. Maine’s coastal isolation gave me the perfect canvas for that tension, where a story about strange lights could spiral into something much darker.
What intrigues you about the horror and paranormal genres that led you to write this book?
Horror has always been about intimacy, about getting uncomfortably close to the things we would rather avoid. The paranormal allows those inner struggles to manifest outward, in ways that are unsettling but true. Kat’s sarcasm, self-destruction, and longing all take shape in Greyfare’s uncanny atmosphere. I love that horror lets us put grief, obsession, and identity into forms that are at once monstrous and heartbreakingly human. It’s not about shock alone, it’s about resonance… leaving the reader haunted in ways they didn’t expect.
Were you able to achieve everything you wanted with the characters in the novel?
Kat fought me every step of the way. She’s painfully real. I wanted her inner spirals, her addictions, and her sharp humor to feel unvarnished, and I think that comes through. Some of the townspeople surprised me, too, especially in how their secrets entwined with hers. I don’t believe in tying everything up neatly. I prefer characters who linger with you after the last page.
What is the next book that you are working on, and when can your fans expect it to be out?
I’m currently in the early stages of my next novel. It will return to the gothic tradition, a story shaped by architecture, community, and the way hidden histories leave their mark on the living. While it won’t be set in Greyfare, it will share that same interest in place as a character. I hope to share more in the coming year. In the meantime, readers can follow updates and join my mailing list through my website, https://junoguadalupe.com/.
Author Links: GoodReads | Website | Amazon
A gothic horror novel about grief, obsession, and the monsters we become when the sea calls our name.
After a brutal divorce and the loss of everything she thought she was, journalist Katherine Calder is on assignment to the fog-drenched town of Greyfare. She’s come to write, to recover, and to disappear for a little while. But Greyfare has other plans.
The town is strange. Too quiet. Full of faces that seem familiar, even when they shouldn’t be. At night, something walks the shore—a reflection of Kat that mimics her, imperfectly. The harbor groans with secrets, and the townspeople cling to ancient traditions they won’t talk about.
When Kat meets Dean, a reclusive widower with a weather-beaten boat and a haunted past, she feels herself unraveling in ways that are both terrifying and intoxicating. Their bond deepens, even as Kat uncovers hints of a centuries-old pact—one that demands sacrifice to keep the devils in the deep.
But the sea is waking.
And Kat may already be part of the offering.
Darkly lyrical and emotionally charged, The Lights of Greyfare is a supernatural descent into love, memory, and the terror of losing yourself to something older than the tide. Perfect for fans of The Haunting of Hill House, this is a horror novel that lingers long after the last page
