Blog Archives
Lonely When You’re Dead
Roy Chaney’s Lonely When You’re Dead is a literary noir mystery about Claude “Murph” Murphy, a freelance writer sent to Quebec City to cover a poetry festival that turns violent almost immediately. What begins as a strange assignment about poets Ian MacGregor and Georges Zazou turns into a murder investigation tangled with riots, biker clubs, drug debts, political unrest, and the uneasy feeling that art can attract danger as easily as admiration.
What I enjoyed most is how confidently strange the book is. A poetry festival turning into something like a street war sounds absurd, and it is, but Chaney plays it with a straight enough face that the absurdity becomes part of the menace. The writing has a gritty, sideways humor to it. Murph is not a slick detective. He is tired, underpaid, curious, and often in over his head, which makes him easy to follow through all the chaos. I liked that. He feels like someone trying to take notes while the room is on fire.
Chaney also makes some bold choices with the tone. The novel moves between deadpan comedy, noir violence, and oddly tender moments, especially around MacGregor, his mother, and the lingering question of what poetry means to people who either worship it, exploit it, or fear it. The story has a lot of names, factions, and backstory pushing into the frame. But that messiness also suits the book. It feels like Murph is chasing a story that keeps changing shape in his hands. The genre may be crime mystery, but the book is also a satire of literary culture, fandom, politics, and the way people turn dead artists into symbols before the body is even cold.
I recommend Lonely When You’re Dead to readers who like offbeat noir, literary mysteries, and crime stories with a crooked sense of humor. For readers who enjoy a mystery that wanders into smoky bars, busted lighthouses, bad poetry readings, and moral fog, this one has a distinct flavor. It’s weird, sharp, and surprisingly thoughtful.
Pages: 294 | ISBN : 978-1737540670
Debt
Wade Parrish’s Debt is a bleak and funny literary novel about Bill and Kaelyn, two overworked New York lawyers whose love is being slowly crushed by student loans, corporate law, family damage, class panic, and the constant arithmetic of survival. The story begins after one of Bill’s colleagues dies by suicide, a death that becomes less an isolated tragedy than a warning flare from the life Bill and K are already living. From there, the novel follows their engagement, their work in the machinery of private equity, their fraying tenderness, and the increasingly grotesque bargains they make to escape the Debt that has come to define them.
I really enjoyed the voice. It’s frantic, hilarious, disgusted, and weirdly exact. Parrish writes corporate language as if it were a parasitic fungus growing over the soul, turning ordinary grief into defined terms and moral collapse into cleanly formatted clauses. I found the book exhausting in all the right ways. It does not merely describe burnout; it reproduces the claustrophobia of it, the way every email, subway platform, family call, and wedding expense becomes another small creditor tapping on the glass.
I also admired how the novel refuses to let Bill and K become simple victims. They are trapped, but they are also vain, cruel, evasive, funny, loving, cowardly, and sometimes monstrous. That complexity gives the book its serrated power. The satire is brutal, but the romance underneath it is not fake. Their love feels like two people clinging to each other in a flooding basement, aware that they may be holding one another under as much as keeping one another alive.
I recommend Debt to readers of dark comedy, corporate and class satire, legal fiction, and psychological drama, especially those drawn to books about ambition, money, burnout, and moral compromise. Readers who enjoy the corrosive social intelligence of Bret Easton Ellis or the workplace despair of Joshua Ferris may find a harsher, more legally intoxicated cousin here. Debt is a love story written in red ink, and every page knows exactly what survival costs.
Pages: 166
A is for Amy
A Is for Amy by Steven Crandell is a romantic comedy novella about Amy, a young widowed mother of three trying to find her way back into desire, confidence, and choice after grief, betrayal, and exhaustion have narrowed her life. The story follows her alphabetically through encounters with Charlie, an alluring ex-milkman with his own wounds, and Quentin, a gentler surprise who eventually becomes the more grounded romantic possibility. It’s funny, messy, and deliberately intimate, a romance that is less about being rescued than about remembering that wanting something is allowed.
I really liked the voice. It’s sharp, playful, and sometimes outrageous, but underneath the jokes there is real loneliness. Amy’s thoughts move the way a tired parent’s mind moves, bouncing from breast-feeding to unpaid bills to sex to self-help books to the weird emotional weather of being seen again. I liked that the humor doesn’t polish her life into something cute. It lets the house be chaotic. It lets grief be ugly. It lets motherhood be loving and boring and gross and sacred, sometimes all on the same page.
Crandell makes a bold choice with the alphabet structure, and I think it works because the book itself feels like Amy trying to name her life one piece at a time. Attraction. Baby Bartlette. Freedom. Nutella. Yes. The structure gives the novella a quick, bright rhythm, almost like flipping through snapshots. I did sometimes feel the comedy pushed hard, especially with Bart and some of the broader side characters, but even then, the excess seems tied to Amy’s way of surviving. She turns pain into punchlines because otherwise the pain would just sit there, heavy and unmoving.
As a romantic comedy novella, A Is for Amy will probably appeal most to readers who like love stories with bite, warmth, and a little domestic chaos. I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys character-driven romance, especially stories about second chances after loss. This book has sass, it has crumbs on the floor, kids at the door, and a heart that keeps choosing to open.
Pages: 95 | ASIN : B0GL9VKNXS
Survival of the Fittest
In Adventures of a Looney Scot, you share your childhood experiences in Glasgow and trace your life through class, landscape, and national identity through a comedic lens. What made you decide to tell your life story?
I am no ‘spring chicken’, hence I need to speak up now for my children’s sake, or forever hold my tongue. Note that Adventures of a Looney Scot follows the first part of our hero’s life (see video link) as described in Book 1 of the Quantum Leap Forward trilogy that sets the scene for Ewan MacLeod’s leap from Scotland to Hong Kong. (see Facebook). This is soon to be followed by Book 2 Epicentre: Hong Kong (Edition 2) when that city state experiences the shock of The Big One; then finally Book 3 The Making of Punta – our resort in the Philippines that presents the development of The Most Sustainable and Liveable Resort in the Philippines (see Punta Riviera Resort and also Facebook).
How did you decide what to include from such a wide-ranging life without losing that sense of spontaneity?
As described above, each stage is presented as a book in the trilogy. My life has, in fact, been discontinuous and very much shaped by movements from growing up in Scotland, then moving to Hong Kong, life and death in Hong Kong; then moving to the Philippines; each being very much moulded by the three women in my life who have kept us in shape, given us strong direction, and helped us keep our own and our families’ heads above water. When all else fails – exercise your sirtuin genes and – keep breathing! Ach well, that’s life!
Your family life is depicted with both chaos and loyalty. How do you see those dynamics now, looking back?
Keeping our heads above water includes that from tsunamis and flooding, for example, from two super typhoons in the latter part of 2025 and a 4-6m high tidal surge wave that smacked into our resort Punta Riviera Resort at Bolinao, Pangasinan. The stories throughout this trilogy are partly about picking ourselves up after each disaster and learning from them. Filipinos have specific words for this recovery, namely Kapwas or Bayanihan, where everyone gets up after a disaster, helps everyone else near them to do the same by seeing themselves in others, then all move forward in the same direction. In the West, we follow the philosophy of ‘Survival of the Fittest,’ which is a very weak alternative and not how civilizations have survived natural disasters over centuries. When Matt Gandi was asked by a reporter after visiting Churchill’s cabinet in London: ‘So what do you think about British Civilization?’ he is reported to have replied: ‘Oh, that would be nice.’
If readers take one thing from your story, what do you hope it is?
Readers may appreciate that in Scotland, our Ancient Ancestors from a previous civilization left us precious ancient cultural secrets that helped us keep the Roman Empire out by forcing them to build Hadrian’s Wall, the English wall-bangers at bay for many years, and this helped us maintain our unique national identity. This led to our unusual DNA and our use of intuition, invention, and creativity during and after the Age of Enlightenment and Industrialization. However, whilst these are important issues, my pride in being a Scot and maintaining a healthy sense of humour are the key ingredients in this soup.
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
The Proverbial Crock Pot
Space Station Halcyon follows a middle-aged gambler coerced into managing a derelict space station as he faces both mob pressure and a doomed government inspection. Where did the idea behind this story come from?
Hoo boy. Bits and pieces fell into the proverbial crock pot over the course of a few weeks. Daryl the manatee came from an awkward encounter I once had with a real life manatee in a beach bar (I don’t want to talk about it). Hali the AI was inspired by that time Chat GPT made me cry (for reasons I’ve now totally forgotten). Joey is basically a better version of me, but also a raging alcoholic.
All of this marinated for a few weeks in a midlife crisis, and voila! Space Station Halcyon was served!
Do you think comedy makes violence hit harder, or softens it?
Comedy is like the soothing back rub on the tense shoulders of deadly violence. It should be used lovingly, sparingly. Otherwise, it’s just a nuisance.
Do you see the station as a kind of found family, even if it’s a dysfunctional one?
The station is more like a high security cell block of felons who are so socially stunted, so painfully outcast, they need an AI to prompt them not to kill each other. So, yeah, they’re just like family.
What kind of reader do you hope finds this book?
The kind who will buy lots and lots of copies of my book and sprinkle them freely about their favorite watering holes, fitness centers, and places of worship.
Author Website
(Management is not responsible for anything that happens to you)
Joey Mumbai’s down on his luck and over his head. To pay off his gambling debts, he’s forced to run an old space station at the end of the galaxy as a “legitimate business” for the mob. All Joey has to do is make money—and not attract any attention. But Space Station Halcyon is like a floating death trap, with a rage-filled manatee, a psychotically cheerful computer, and a sports bar that may or may not be possessed.
When a government code inspector and her enforcerbot drop by the station, Joey must bluff, bribe, and connive his way through interstellar bureaucracy, laser gun fights, and the worst beer in the galaxy. Can Joey turn his derelict station and degenerate crew into something resembling legality? Or is the whole place going to explode in a cloud of code violations? Or maybe both?
Space Station Halcyon is a wild and raucous sci-fi comedy about bad luck, worse decisions, and the cosmic horror of being put in charge. A Hitchhiker’s Guide-esque romp that answers the eternal question: “Who’s in charge around here?”
Adventures of a Looney Scot
Adventures of a Looney Scot is a memoir, but it doesn’t read like a careful march through dates and milestones. It reads like someone sitting across from you, pint in hand, telling you how a rough Glasgow childhood, a fierce family life, and an obsession with the outdoors slowly shaped him into a geologist with a taste for risk, argument, and reinvention. The book’s subtitle, From a Glasgow Urban Warrior to a Professional Geologist, turns out to be the clearest description of what it’s doing: tracing a life through class, landscape, work, and national identity, while keeping one foot in comedy the whole time.
What gives the book its real personality is the voice. McFeat-Smith writes in a way that’s unruly, funny, self-mocking, and deeply attached to Scottish speech and rhythm. A scene about midges lands because the punchline arrives with perfect local bluntness: “If the tourists knew about Scottish midges, they wouldnie come here tae enjoy themselves.” That line captures the book’s whole method. It doesn’t just describe Scotland. It performs Scotland as the author knows it: hard, absurd, affectionate, and never polished to the point of losing its bite.
The middle stretch is where the memoir really finds its shape. The childhood material has real grit, but the outdoor episodes turn that grit into momentum. Canoeing on Loch Lomond, hiking, cycling, close calls, family arguments, and reckless confidence all build the sense that this is a book about being formed by physical experience as much as by education. The book understands that a life story can be told through danger, embarrassment, and stubborn survival just as well as through achievement.
What I found most interesting is how the book gradually expands. It starts as a personal story, then grows into a broader portrait of Scottish culture, marriage, professional identity, food, ancestry, and politics. Jeanie isn’t treated as a side note but as part of the author’s development, and the later chapters move from memoir into a kind of argumentative cultural scrapbook, with sections on Scottish breakfast, self-determination, inventions, and odd laws. That shift makes the book feel true to its own ambitions. This isn’t just a record of one man’s youth. It’s a book that wants to place that youth inside a bigger Scottish story.
Adventures of a Looney Scot is a boisterous, big-hearted memoir about how a particular kind of Scottish boyhood becomes a professional life without ever quite losing its appetite for chaos. It’s at its best when memory, place, and voice are all firing at once, and even when it sprawls, the sprawl feels connected to the author’s personality. What stayed with me wasn’t just the sequence of events, but the sense of a mind trying to understand itself through weather, family, class, work, and country. That’s a rich mix, and the book leans into it with conviction.
Pages: 252 | ASIN : B0GVVPJ9KZ
Space Station Halcyon: “Now Under New Management!”
Space Station Halcyon opens with Joey Mumbai, a middle-aged gambler with a gift for wisecracks and a talent for catastrophe, getting dragooned by a murderous insectoid bookie into running the derelict space station he inherited from his father. What follows is a comic scramble involving mob pressure, an impending government inspection, a gloriously ramshackle station orbiting a planet called Cold Fart, and a crew that seems stitched together from grievance, loyalty, and leftover cosmic grease. It is, in essence, a novel about a loser walking into the worst management job in the galaxy and finding that the dump may have more soul than he does.
I liked this book most when it trusted its own lunacy. Author Matthew C. Lucas does not write jokes as decorative garnish; he writes as if comedy were the station’s oxygen supply. The voice is fast, filthy, self-lacerating, and weirdly nimble, with similes that arrive half-drunk and still land cleanly. Joey’s narration gives the book its voltage: he is slippery, vain, frightened, opportunistic, and yet difficult not to root for. I enjoyed the way the novel lets absurdity and menace coexist in the same breath. A scene can pivot from a strangling to a punchline without feeling coy about either one. That tonal brazenness is harder to pull off than it looks, and here it gives the whole book a scrappy combustion.
What surprised me was that beneath the racket, there is a real emotional undertow. The station is not just a joke-machine; it gradually feels like a cracked habitat for disappointment, inheritance, and accidental belonging. Joey’s relationship to the place, and to the people and entities orbiting within it, gives the comedy a ballast it would not otherwise have. I would not call the novel sentimental, because it has too much bite for that, but it does become unexpectedly tender in the margins. Even when the humor turns maximalist, the book keeps a grubby human pulse. It is worth noing that readers who dislike relentless comic velocity may find it a bit overclocked. Still, I found the excess more often exhilarating than exhausting.
I’d hand Space Station Halcyon to readers who like comic science fiction, space opera farce, absurdist sci-fi, and blue-collar galactic satire, especially people who enjoy shabby worlds, hostile bureaucracies, and characters who fail with style. It sits somewhere between Douglas Adams and Futurama, though Lucas is earthier and more splenetic than Adams, with less elegance and more grime under the fingernails. For the right reader, this is exactly the kind of novel that feels beamed in from a disreputable but beloved corner of the universe. A battered little chaos-engine of a book: vulgar, funny, and far more endearing than I thought it would be.
Pages: 194 | ASIN : B0GJ7GCSHF
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
