Blog Archives
Our Pets Transmogrified
Terry Tumbler Author Interview
The Inlooker follows Thomas as his life changes when his daughter’s cat dies and he realizes that the dead cat’s soul inhabits the body of another cat in the house. This is one of the most unique story setups I’ve read in a long time. How did this idea develop into a story for you?
It is an event that actually happened. We had three cats at the time, each of which died in quick succession and had a unique personality, unlike those of the others. It was a wonder to behold, as each of our pets transmogrified into another way of behaving, which only lasted a couple of days before reverting to the original personality. That was over 30 years ago, but it led me to believe that animals possess spirits like we do.
Thomas works to enhance his powers, not just reading souls and manipulating his own, but taking control of other people. What was the biggest challenge you faced in developing the character along with his powers?
Dispassionate research was needed into reincarnation, spiritualism, poltergeist activity and the possibilities of bodily possession by others. I could not even begin to start this monumental task until retirement. The most profound findings were actually in reincarnation, where much evidence exists and has been documented, especially involving children.
I enjoyed the narrators voice, it’s humorous, dark, clear, and ironic. Was this an intentional part of the story or just a facet of your natural writing style?
It was deliberate and based on the style of an old-time English actor called George Saunders. I can’t honestly say if it reflects my style in general. There’s a touch of Terry Pratchett in there too, plus the zaniness of P.G.Wodehouse.
What is the next story you are working on and when will that book be available?
I’ve recently issued The Sightseers Agency and am working on another in the Sci-Fi vein that will be ready by June 2017. All my books are near-future speculative and most of the contents are based on what is possible in key areas of science.
Author Links: Twitter | Facebook | Website | GoodReads | Blogspot
The magical World of Science Fiction is dominated by stories about individuals with outlandish costumes, fantastical skills and superior strength. They compete energetically for attention, and capture our imagination in the most unbelievable of ways.
But what if in real life, there were to exist a force that could take on any of these mythical beings, without needing to possess similar or opposing strengths?
Thomas Beckon wields that force, in much the same way that a contagion can wipe out most of humanity, from within. For Thomas is an Inlooker, perhaps the only one as far as he is aware, and is truly capable of invading any person’s soul that he chooses.
Luckily for those around him, Thomas is a benign individual who chooses a path through life that barely creates a ripple in his wake. At least, what he does is so undetectable that any malevolence in his actions is hardly ever recognized, even superficially.
Pity those who cross swords (or should I say souls?) with the Inlooker, for he can take anyone down, or initiate a chain-reaction of catastrophes, regardless of a person’s super abilities, or position in life.
Then he becomes less benign, and begins to focus on changing the society in which we live. Thereafter, he focuses on the world.
A Fantastic, Erotic, Horrific Tale Like No Other
Fawn Bonning Author Interview
The Heart of Hannen follows Christine Clavin who is not a typical teenage girl, her past is marred by a violent attack. This tenacious teenager must survive a dark world where men own women like cattle. What was the inspiration for the idea behind this story?
I wanted to see if I could fuse all the genres that I love into one work. I’m a huge horror fan. I love the way it makes my heart race and my skin crawl. But I also enjoy a good fantasy, especially those set in dystopian worlds where it’s a constant battle just to stay alive. I guess I just love a good challenge. Add to that my love of a steamy romance and the result is what I like to call a fantastic, erotic, horrific tale like no other.
Christine could use her wits, temper, and sharp tongue to do great things, even under the control of an oppressive culture and evil men. What morals and obstacles did you feel were important to highlight the character’s development?
Christine’s primary obstacle is her violent temper. She quickly comes to realize that failing to control it could mean her demise in this new brutal world. She must win the battle against her own inner demons if she is to survive the monsters of Atriia.
The best part of this book was the invented language. How did you set about creating such a unique and interesting language?
I’m so glad to hear that you enjoyed the Atriian language. Unfortunately, not everyone shares that sentiment. This is a series that takes a bit of extra work. It didn’t make sense to throw Christine into a completely foreign world where they spoke perfect English. At the same time, I didn’t want to make the Atriian language so difficult that it would detract from the reading experience. It’s primarily English, with a smattering of Atriian words, most of which have meanings that are easily deduced. Sola=sun, sol=day, luna=moon, lun=night, aya=yes, naya=no, and so forth. I tried to introduce the words slowly, a few per chapter, so the reader didn’t need to constantly turn to the dictionary. As the story progressed, the language grew word by word until it was more extensive than initially intended. By the end of book III, my readers are fabulously fluent in Atriian.
The Heart of Hannen is book one in the Atriian Trilogy. Where does the next book in the series take your characters?
Book II takes poor Christine to horrible places. Just horrible. And book III, oh my gosh, horrendous!
Author Links: GoodReads | Twitter | Facebook | Website
Christine, a troubled teen with a dark past, is miserable in her small town. Shadowed in shame, she feels destined to live her lonely life as an outcast. She has no idea that her true destiny lies in a different town, in a different world; a most brutal world called Atriia. There she learns the true meaning of misery, the true meaning of loneliness, the true meaning of shame. But she also learns that her bravery is boundless as she battles against a formidable foe, a dark shadow that tries to smother the land. And in the arms of a most unlikely candidate, she also learns the true meaning of love. He is Hannen Fallier, the one they call the foul fraigen dropper, revered by men for his fearless feats, but looked upon by women with open disdain. With a face horribly mauled, he hides behind a mask of shame, deeming himself unworthy of love. That he would seek acceptance from Christine is irony in its purest form. That he would seek her love . . . the ultimate betrayal.
Seed Me
Would you like to try the 13 seed Remedy? It dates back generations and hails from Scotland. These seeds are the greatest of all Superfoods! If I were you I would steer far far away from those seeds. Like the olden days of the bible, beware the peddler selling snake oil, if it sounds too good to be true, it is, and will just land you in trouble. This is what happens in Seed Me by Konn Lavery. Unfortunately, for Logan and Janet the warning came too late and they ate the mysterious black and red seeds. This brings the unlikely pair closer than they ever intended to be, and into a world of magic, mystery and murder.
The story takes places in Alberta Canada, in the town of Edmonton. Edmonton is a tiny town where nothing exciting ever happens. The story is told from the perspective of Logan who is a recovering drug addict that plays in a band with his best friend Skip. Logan has a lot of emotional baggage from his drug addiction days, mostly the loss of his longtime girlfriend Emily that became one of the victims of the legendary 4-20 killings. These killings were thought to be done by a serial killer that is called the drainer because all the blood is drained from the victims. They are either covered in puncture wounds or partially ripped apart and still drained of all blood. The story line really takes off after Logan and Skip are out at a bar. While they are outside smoking and police chase ends across the street. When the police stop the truck a headless body is found in the back. Later behind the bar Logan starts kissing a girl who he later discovers looks exactly like the dead girl in the truck. This leads to Logan wondering if he is crazy, done too many drugs, or if he is really involved in some crazy plot.
Logan’s partner in all this is Janet, the hippy college girl that turns out to be a lot smarter than anyone anticipated. Character development on both Logan and Janet is slow going and your over halfway through the novel before you get a real idea of who Janet is and not the ‘dumb blond groupie’ she is portrayed at the start. Konn does a great job introducing the reader to the background and really gives a feel for the small town world. His attention to detail on developing the character of Logan and Janet and even Skip to a point, is meticulous. It does take a while to get the full picture but that’s because so many little details are filled in and really give the characters a full spectrum of characterization so that you can relate to them.
Janet and Logan start investigating the strange seeds and the murdered girl, revealed as a local named Vicky, and decide to talk to the truck driver. From the driver they learn about the strange group of people called harvesters. They ware long black trench coats, and have a tattoo and scarification of plants on them. They refuse to talk about these things and are very mysterious. Yet they keep showing up where Logan is.
Who are the harvesters, what is going on with the strange seeds, and why is Logan hearing voices? What is going on in him, and who is doing the draining on the bodies that keep showing up around town? Konn answers these questions and leaves the readers looking for more answers by the end. While the theme has a lot of Pagan and Vampirism traits, this is a unique twist and its own direction. An engaging read that will draw you in and connect you to the characters.
Pages: 228 | ISBN: 0988116081
At War With Chaos
G.S. Scott Author Interview
Cleansed follows the life and adventures of a young man as his destiny is unwittingly grafted to a battle among a triumvirate of otherworldly gods. What made you write a story about this topic? Anything pulled from your life experiences?
The story is part of an overall arc revolving around the idea of how the gods, or anyone in high places of power, affect the lives or normal people, and how people can think they know what’s going on, but, in truth, they’ve no idea.
I felt that the characters in this story, especially the main character Dirge, were well developed. What morals and guiding principles did you use to create your characters?
Well, as the world is set in a time where the god of Chaos is in complete control, I felt Dirge’s moral base would be that of the god of Order who is at war with Chaos. I modeled those beliefs generally after the Judea/Christian faiths. Personally, I find them far too harsh, but I felt they fit the setting quite well.
I felt that the story flowed naturally. What was one thing that happened organically in the story that you did not plan, but was happy to find?
I would say Dirge’s constant internal struggle. I’d initially planned on the story to be much shorter and simpler, but as I wrote the various confits became more evident and dynamic. Plus I found out that there was far more to the story than I’d first thought.
What is the next book that you are working on and when will that be available?
Next I’m working on a story that is being released in two volumes and they follow Cleansed. It’s tilted Chaos Reigns. The first is Volume 1: The Hand of God, and the second will be Volume 2: The Tower of Time. The first is nearly complete and I expect it to be our sometime next year.
Author Links: GoodReads | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The world is in the grasp of the God of Chaos, whose only mantra is:Do as Thou Wilt.
When Chaos orchestrates the mass slaughter he calls The Cleansing, men and Gods alike turn to stand up against him. With the God of Chaos, the God of Death, and the God of Order clashing, their followers must face off in an epic, bloody struggle.
Dirge, an apprentice to the Brotherhood of Assassins and follower of Death, is approached by The Prophet of the forgotten God of Order. Suddenly, he finds himself at odds with all that he knows and all that will be.
Three Gods. One man – torn between what is right and what is wrong and what he’s destined to do.
Hungry Monster Book Awards: November 2016
The Hungry Monster Book Awards are awarded to books that have astounded and amazed us with unique writing styles, vivid worlds, complex characters, and original ideas. These books deserve extraordinary praise and The Hungry Monster is proud to acknowledge the hard work, dedication, and imagination of these talented authors.
Gold Award Winner
Bean Takes a Walk by Ann Bevans & Matthew Ethan Gray
Silver Award Winners
Mother Athina by Danny Estes
Game Over by Derek Eddington
Beyond Cloud Nine by Greg Spry
The Second Sphere by Peter Banks
Seed of Treachery by C.A. MacLean
Wolves Among Sheep by Steven Pajak
Chaste: A Tale From Perilisc by Jesse Teller
The Six and the Gardeners of Ialana by Katlynn Brooke
“When I look at a book, I see the history of books, old tomes with sacred knowledge. The authorities that controlled the books controlled the people. Books brought the old world to order. My books are how I bring my life and my thoughts to order, the only lasting way I can see to impart wisdom and ask questions.” – Jesse Teller author of Chaste
Visit the Hungry Monster Book Awards page to see award information and see all award winners.
I Was In Hell
Jesse Teller Author Interview
Chaste focuses on an evil god and his followers in a remote town that has been overcome with a sickness. Five strangers arrive and all their destinies take a turn. What was your inspiration for the setup of the story and how did that help you create the ending?
My inspiration was vague. I’d had a few negative experiences with churches in the past, when I was a religious man. I had the idea of a small town that had experienced the same thing, the perverting of God’s word, of His ideals and methods. The title of the book came with the inspiration of a town struggling to be pure, but unable to find it. A lot of my books are studies of an issue that I’m dealing with in my life. This was my attempt at making peace with God and church, along with a few other dark issues. And Chaste did give me peace. I think it worked out. This book gave me hope, and I hope when other people read it, they can find a path back to God, or at least a path back to purity.
There are plenty of characters in Chaste that I felt were intriguing and well-developed. Who was your favorite character to write for?
I would have to say Sob. I repressed a lot of the abuse and darkness from my childhood. When it started coming back to me, it was debilitating and random. It would come back in the middle of a conversation, with a trigger word I didn’t expect. An entire scene from my past would flash before my eyes. When things like that are happening in your everyday life, you feel mad, as if you’re trembling out of control. So I wrote Sob, a woman haunted by shreds of a past she doesn’t want to remember, a powerful woman, a proficient killer, unapologetic in action and methods, but fragile in mind, always a breath away from the horror of her past. Sob healed me. I will always love her for that.
I felt that Chaste delivers the drama so well that it flirts with the grimdark genre. Was it your intention to give the story such a dark tone?
Chaste was originally supposed to be a short story. I was 63 pages in, and barely scratching the surface of the story, when I realized I was writing something bigger. Chaste was an accidental novel. I had no idea what I was doing when I wrote the rough draft of this book. But I had just been through a lot of mind-numbing therapy, and most of me was a raw and open wound. I was not trying to write a dark book. It just kind of happened. When I wrote the rough draft, grimdark wasn’t an idea yet. This was 12 years ago. There was no such term as grimdark. I didn’t even know to call it dark fantasy. It was just a story I was writing. I entered Chaste broken, and when I left it, I was healed a bit. When you’re going through that kind of catharsis, there’s no internal editor. You literally can’t hold back. There were times when I would write a scene, stand up, back away from my computer, fight back a scream and weep openly. Things were being hammered out that there were no rational words for. I was walking a razor’s edge between reality and fantasy, able to speak about my past without talking about my past. Chaste is dark because when I wrote it, I was in Hell, and the character Cheryl dragged me out.
What is the next book that you are working on and when will it be published?
My next book is called Mestlven. It, as well, is A Tale from Perilisc. Mestlven tells the story of Sob, after she has put a face on her past, and she can go home. She has been victimized, her world shattered, and now, after Chaste, she knows it. So Sob goes back home to wreak her revenge and fight for her sanity. I went a little mad when I wrote this book. When Sob punished her abusers, she punished mine as well. So look for Mestlven. The soft release date is April 15, 2017.
Author Links: GoodReads | Twitter | Facebook | Website
When her devout parents died, Cheryl turned her back on her god. Years of denial and self-loathing have defeated her. Her life consists of taking orders and succumbing to abuse. A group of strangers stops in Chaste for the night, but an unnamed threat is preying on the town. Tragic deaths have become more and more frequent. Cheryl wants to protect these travelers, expose the evil force, and save her fellow citizens, but she must find a way to believe in hope.
The True Tree Chronicles: Cleansed
Cleansed by G.S. Scott follows the life and adventures of a young man named Dirge as his destiny is unwittingly grafted to a battle among a triumvirate of otherworldly gods. The fantasy tale, which has a refreshingly contained scope and brisk pace considering the current genre climate, begins with Dirge as a small boy who is loved, if a bit neglected, by his prostitute-with-a-heart-of-gold mother. As street urchins are wont to do, Dirge quickly comes across his call to action in the form of a magical pendant that he finds during an early flight from danger, and thus sets the stage for later conflict. In a series of events that may be a bit on the nose for some readers and exactly right for others, Dirge loses his mother, becomes an orphan, and is immediately adopted into a patriarchal and heraldic order that provides discipline, training, and spiritual sustenance. By the end of the first act of the novel, Scott has positioned Dirge to be the prototypical young warrior – full of both shining promise and untested potential. What follows is a by the numbers rise-fall-redemption story seeing the fated hero forced to choose between serving the god of death or the god of law as they both combat the singularly evil force of Chaos.
Scott’s Cleansed offers enough quirk on top of the familiar that the snappy tempo makes the book a quick and exciting read. Unlike other writers that slog the reader over every continent, mountain range, and ocean, Scott understands that no one needs to see the entire globe to feel gravity. The book primarily takes place in one city, and most of the scenes actually occur in or around the same tavern. Admirably, Cleansed dedicates it’s pages to putting characters together and keeping the background where it should be.
While familiarity and the use of certain tropes are not automatically drawbacks (and how could they be when they are impossible to avoid entirely?), there are some legitimate issues to take up with Cleansed. For example, scenes often begin or end at the wrong moments in time, making them either unbalanced or extraneous. There are editorial issues such as misused homonyms or dropped words. And these small items can be overlooked, but what is less escapable is a badly managed point-of-view. The book can loosely be described as 3rd person “close” or 3rd person limited omniscience with respect to the lead character, Dirge. That is the construct that the text follows. Except when it doesn’t. At times it drifts into the first person of Dirge. At other points the 3rd person omniscience balloons to include other characters’ interior thoughts simultaneously. At other points still, the limited 3rd person will focus on a side character’s interiority and exclude Dirge, and this doesn’t occur in any meaningful serialization. It doesn’t happen all the time, which would be more acceptable, because then it might represent a gimmick with which the reader could build a stable, albeit annoyed, pattern or logic. The fact is, the POV slippage happens irregularly.
For some readers, point-of-view grievances are pedantic. For others, they are deal breakers. If you are the former, G.S. Scott’s Cleansed will provide you with a fun, fast read that is action packed and well worth the time.
Pages: 306 | ASIN: B01J92LAEO
Wolves Among Sheep
There is madness in the world that few can ever understand. What drives a person to get out of bed in the morning or take a life in the evening is different for every person. Steven Pajak carefully crafts a story for us that involve mindless torture; endless agony and that special breed of mental instability psychological thrillers enjoy so much. While Wolves Among Sheep is meant to be a book introducing Jack Monroe, a United States Deputy Marshal, it really focuses on the relationship between Jack’s brother Michael and unstable, disgruntled former employee Robert Elliott Lang. As readers we are roped into a fascinating situation where a single man seeks to completely destroy the life of another for reasons only he could possibly understand. With heart in throat and eyes glued to the page readers will want to desperately know the why and crumble when it’s finally revealed.
Pajak knows his craft well and is very good at describing the slow, torturous break down between Robert and Michael. Michael has the things that Robert wants and is seen to be the one who has denied our antagonist all that could have been his. Robert desperately needs help and the signs pointing to his devolution have been visible for a long time. Perhaps it’s because he’s just another name in the email directory or because he’s that difficult, creepy guy that no one really wants to befriend but the fact remains that Robert does not get the help he needs. Instead, he gets a target: a person whose life he can work towards crumbling as carefully as possible. We know quite early on in the tale that Robert is a man who is not below putting dead rats in cars and forwarding incriminating emails in order to destroy a relationship. We know all of this but the hypnotic destruction pulls the attention and causes us to question what we read.
If there were to be any areas where Pajak could improve it would be simple editing. There are a few spelling mistakes and words that are potentially mistyped. This is not Pajak’s first time at the rodeo so he knows how to write a good story. That is what makes the minute, yet noticeable, editorial issues stand out even more. Unless you’re extremely particular about these sorts of things they will not ruin the story for you, but they will be obvious.
Wolves Among Sheep takes its readers on a dangerously slippery trail. There are aspects of Robert’s behavior that seem almost normal; those small little tics that are easily over looked. While Jack is instrumental in hunting down Robert after he has successfully destroyed any semblance of a ‘normal’ life for Michael, the story truly revolves around our protagonist and antagonist. The tale would not be the same if Jack were not in it, however, so it is important to note that his existence is necessary to reach the conclusion Pajak came to.
Readers who enjoy a good psychological thriller along the lines of Dean Koontz and Stephen King will not be disappointed with the creepy tale Steven Pajak offers for consumption.
Pages: 220 | ASIN: B01LYY5ZJ1
LITERARY TITAN 