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The Relic
Lloyd A. Meeker’s The Relic is a spiritual fantasy, a queer love story, and a fable about belonging all at once. It begins with Brother Magnus, a young monk whose desperate need to belong has made him vulnerable to people who take advantage of his trust. After the corrupt Father Xavier falsely accuses him of sexual misconduct, Magnus is sent on what amounts to a suicide mission: carry the supposedly sacred Mantle of San Sarvras across the desert to General Tun and return with Brother Calmas. The complication is that the relic is already known to be a fake. Yet while the object may have a fraudulent history, its power turns out to be very real. It speaks to Magnus, saves his life, and slowly leads him away from the rigid world he knows. What starts as a pilgrimage becomes a much more personal journey about deciding who he wants to be when nobody else gets to define him.
The strongest part of the novel is Magnus’s transformation into Mateo and the relationships that grow around his new identity. Zoya, the witch who gives him a home, challenges almost everything he has been taught about goodness, faith, work, and nature. Her nephew Nuri brings something different: music, humor, sexuality, imagination, and eventually love. Mateo’s romance with Nuri gives the book much of its emotional warmth because it directly answers the loneliness established in the opening chapters. Mateo has spent most of his life believing belonging is something he has to earn through labor, obedience, or sex. With Zoya and Nuri, he begins to understand belonging as connection instead of payment. Even his magical transformation follows that idea. The relic literally becomes part of his body, and by the end, Mateo chooses to become a tree beside Nuri. It’s a wonderfully strange conclusion, but it fits the novel’s belief that love can change the form of a life without erasing its meaning.
Meeker’s magic is especially interesting because it depends on language, intention, and agreement. Mateo can heal Nuri’s crushed hand, force a habitual liar to tell the truth, protect people from harm, and reshape lives through statements that become magical contracts. That makes words consequential in a way that suits a story so concerned with promises, lies, and trust. Some of the most memorable scenes come from Mateo slowly discovering that power and then realizing power itself isn’t wisdom. The novel deliberately circles its central lessons several times, especially the distinction between love and approval, the danger of confusing punishment with justice, and the importance of accepting the world before trying to act within it. That repetition gives the story a meditative, almost devotional rhythm. At times it slows the plot, but it also makes Mateo’s development feel like a practice. He has to keep learning the same truths at deeper levels.
In that respect, The Relic reminded me most of Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist. Both books send an earnest young man across a desert and turn a physical journey into an education in how to listen to the world. Both treat nature as alive with meaning, and both allow signs that might initially seem like coincidence or superstition to become part of a larger spiritual language. The difference is where the two journeys lead. Santiago in The Alchemist learns to pursue his Personal Legend, while Mateo gradually becomes less interested in an individual destiny and more interested in relationship, community, and what Nuri calls “the song.” Meeker’s version of spiritual awakening is more bodily and communal. Love, sex, farming, animals, trees, sickness, death, and magic all belong to the same living system. Mateo doesn’t discover himself by separating from the world. He discovers himself by becoming more entangled with it.
What stayed with me most about The Relic is its sincerity. Meeker takes some genuinely unusual ideas, including a talking relic, magical bargains, lovers becoming intertwined trees, and a former monk learning to hear the music of the natural world, and treats them with complete emotional seriousness. The result is a novel that feels tender even when it deals with exploitation, religious corruption, violence, and loss. Mateo’s final choice works because the whole story has been moving toward it. The epilogue extends that idea beautifully, turning the two trees into a source of healing for others while the larger world continues with all its ordinary messiness. The Relic is a story about learning that happiness isn’t control over what happens to us.
Pages: 267 | ASIN : B0GT5183RL
Unapologetic Ambition
Roots & Wrath centers around five former friends and witches who find themselves bound together by their deceased professor’s will. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
You know, ideas come from everywhere. I had a friend who was fascinated by tontines–a type of will where the last person living gets everything (it’s now illegal because it incentivizes murder). But from there it became a story about ambition, friendship, power, vulnerability, and those bad choices we make while coming of age that cannot be undone. Hopefully, for most of us, those bad choices aren’t as costly as for these young witches.
The novel focuses as much on broken friendships as it does on magic. Why did you want the emotional history between the women to drive the story?
Because this concept started with the concept of a tontine, it was always necessary that this story focus not on an individual but on a group. Then, I needed compelling reasons for them not to trust each other–the incentive of a will simply is not enough to make it believable that five friends, or even five strangers, would move to murder as the solution. There had to be compelling reasons for divide, mistrust, and… well, proactively defensive action, if you will.
Alicia is a wonderfully complicated protagonist—sharp, defensive, funny, and deeply wounded. What did you enjoy most about writing her?
Thank you! Yes, I absolutely loved writing these deeply flawed ladies. Alicia and her friends let me really let loose my darker side with their unapologetic ambition, ego, judgement, and snark. I find the most flawed characters are the ones I love the most in other stories, and I think that deeply flawed women in particular are so important–we need to get women out of these glass cases and let us be fully, problematically human, in stories and in life.
I find a problem in well-written stories, in that I always want there to be another book to keep the story going. Is there a second book planned?
For now, at least, Roots & Wrath is a standalone. I think it has duology potential to see what happens to Beverly when she grows up and goes to Millinocket herself, but I’m not sure where that goes–yet.
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Six young witches hungry to achieve remarkable things…until they performed a clandestine ritual in the dark wood. Only five witches returned. The secret they buried beneath a hungry great oak split them apart forever.
Now there are five.
Eighteen years later, the death of their legendary mentor forces them back together. In her will, the professor binds them to carry on her work until their magical bond is shattered for good…by death.
Soon, there will be four.
The remaining witches scramble to uncover who is willing to kill to escape their bond. Magical spells and broken alliances—not to mention a relentless ghost of their past deeds—drive them back to the dark wood to unearth their past.
Can any of them survive the specter of the dark wood and finally put the past to rest?
Roots & Wrath is a standalone dark fantasy featuring ruthless, unapologetic female characters in a twisty, suspenseful whirlwind of a plot. Perfect for fans of The Craft, Yellowjackets, Plain Bad Heroines, The Return, and Once and Future Witches.
Roots & Wrath
Roots & Wrath, by E. J. Wenstrom, is a dark fantasy thriller about five former friends, witches who once formed a powerful pentam at an elite magical school, being dragged back together after the death of their old professor. What begins as an uncomfortable memorial turns into something much darker when Alicia, Everyn, Isa, Rachel, and Sybil learn that Professor Berriman’s will has bound them to her unfinished work through an old blood oath. From there, the novel becomes a sharp, witchy story about power, guilt, ambition, betrayal, and the awful weight of the past refusing to stay buried.
I liked how prickly the book allows its characters to be. Alicia, especially, is not softened for the reader. She is angry, defensive, vain, wounded, and often funny in a cutting way. I found that refreshing. The story doesn’t pretend that old friendships, especially ones forged under pressure and broken by trauma, can be fixed with one heartfelt conversation. These women hurt each other. They also know each other in ways no one else can. That tension gives the book its pulse. The magic is fun and dangerous, but the emotional history is what kept pulling me in.
Wenstrom’s choices give the novel a nice bite. The alternating “now” and “then” structure works well because it lets the dread build in layers. We see the adult witches circling each other like knives, then we go back and watch how they became that way. I also appreciated that the school setting isn’t just nostalgic window dressing. Millinocket feels enchanted, with its rituals, codes, and old power, but it also feels like a place where ambition can curdle. The book is candid about how institutions can reward brilliance while ignoring harm. That idea sits under the plot like a root system.
I would recommend Roots & Wrath to readers who enjoy dark fantasy, witch fiction, and supernatural thrillers with messy adult friendships at the center. It will especially appeal to readers who like stories about magical schools after the shine has worn off, when the graduates are older, angrier, and still paying for what happened there. This isn’t cozy witchcraft. It’s sharp, moody, and full of grudges. And for the right reader, that is exactly the fun of it.
Pages: 397 | ASIN : B0GSGPD2PD
Dynamic Storytelling
The War for Heaven follows a dying man who wakes in an afterlife that is not the serene heaven he imagined. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
Like Damian, I grew up in a tight-knit religious community in central Illinois, where the concept of a flawless afterlife is a comforting certainty for many. Moving around the country after college opened my eyes to the beautiful complexity of cultures and ideologies. I realized that the differences between our politics and religions are vast, and no single system is perfect enough to guarantee everyone’s happiness here on Earth. These gulfs became undeniably stark during the COVID-19 pandemic, as the world fractured into rigid binaries of right versus wrong, good versus evil. For those who believe in an afterlife, its ultimate appeal lies in its perfection—the promise that all suffering will cease. It was precisely that fragile concept of perfection, and the inherently flawed human attempt to capture or force it into existence, that inspired the setup of The War for Heaven.
Damian and Alena’s reunion feels emotionally complicated rather than sentimental. How did you approach writing love after death?
Relationships are hard! Even the healthiest ones require continuous care, attention, and compromise. In any successful partnership, both individuals inevitably set aside certain personal wants for the sake of the collective bond. I wanted to carry this reality directly into the afterlife to again challenge the idea of perfection. Just because Damian and Alena find themselves in a “better place” doesn’t mean they suddenly get everything they ever wanted. Exploring that natural friction—where individual desires clash even in eternity—makes for more compelling and dynamic storytelling than a purely sentimental reunion. And I think that makes Damian and Alena’s love for one another more real!
What drew you to combining theological fantasy with mystery and political intrigue?
The idea for The War for Heaven has been rolling around in my head for over twenty years. At the time of its inception, I was active in my church, so it was destined to be theological in nature. Creating the fantasy elements—the Dungeon of Darkness, the Sphere of Doom, and the Hall of Hands—was incredibly fun, but they also served to hint at a much grander, more unsettling mystery. As both the world and myself changed in the intervening years, so did the story. Its political intrigue was heavily inspired by the onset of the pandemic, specifically in how the crisis was so deeply weaponized for political gain. Combining these elements allowed me to use the fun, high-concept machinery of epic fantasy to explore the very real, fractured political realities we face today.
If readers leave The War for Heaven thinking differently about grief, eternity, or human connection, what do you hope stays with them most?
More than anything, I hope readers walk away with the understanding that perfection is an ideal simply not worth pursuing. Throughout the book, I tried to give the antagonists real depth and personality. Their grievances are valid and identifiable. In the end, though, it is their own selfish, short-sighted pursuits that bring about their downfall. The human experience, which encompasses grief, love, joy, and sadness, is best when navigated as a collective. Life is about lifting everyone up together. If readers leave the book thinking that our shared, flawed connections here and now matter more than a manufactured eternity, then The War for Heaven has done its job.
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After a fatal car accident, Damian awakens in a bureaucratic Afterlife where faith is irrelevant and souls can perish again. Reunited with his wife and best friend, he tries to settle into a perfect existence, taking a job in the Embassy’s Department of Satanic Investigations. But the Afterlife isn’t as peaceful as he imagined.
Whispers inside the Embassy warn of a growing conspiracy that threatens all of Creation. Damian and his allies are locked in a race to secure the Sphere of Doom and stop an evil soul from infiltrating the Celestial City. The dangerous relic is creating a pattern of destructive havoc around the city, paving the way for a full-scale invasion by Satan and the Fallen.
As Damian navigates office politics, bureaucracy, and ancient secrets, he’s forced to confront lingering memories from his time on Earth. His past urges him to question his faith, his choices, and the kind of person he truly is. And as he gets closer to the truth, he realizes the true enemy might be someone he trusts with his life—and his afterlife.
The War for Heaven blends bureaucratic fantasy with cosmic intrigue in a gripping tale of afterlife, betrayal, and redemption you won’t want to miss.
The War for Heaven
The War for Heaven, by Isaac Grisham, begins with Damian Hartter dying in a car accident and waking up in an afterlife that is not the serene, doctrinally tidy heaven he half-feared and half-wanted. Reunited with his dead wife, Alena, he enters a Celestial City full of strange rules, alien souls, bureaucratic departments, uneasy Guardians, lost children, and old fractures in Creation. What first feels like a second chance at domestic peace soon becomes something larger and darker: a mystery about the architecture of eternity, the politics of salvation, and the war still smoldering between Heaven and Hell.
I liked how the novel refuses to make the afterlife merely luminous. Grisham gives Heaven kitchens, libraries, orientations, traffic, work, committees, and petty cruelty; the result is funnier and more unsettling than a paradise made of harp music. Damian’s skepticism is the book’s best instrument. He’s grieving, sarcastic, wounded, and often ill-prepared for the cosmic scale of what he discovers, which keeps the story human even when the canvas stretches into multiversal theology. The humor works because it’s slightly mordant rather than flippant, and the worldbuilding has a pleasingly ornate quality: diamond walls, bureaucratic embassies, soul logistics, and infernal loopholes all clicking into place like celestial machinery.
What surprised me most was how emotionally grounded the book remains beneath its speculative abundance. Damian and Alena’s reunion could have become sentimental, but their marriage still has texture: old disagreements, unspoken losses, love complicated by memory. The subplot involving children in the Afterlife gives the story a genuine moral ache, and Damian’s shifting relationship to fatherhood feels earned rather than pasted on for softness. The book’s explanations are expansive. I found myself admiring the ambition. Grisham isn’t simply asking what Heaven looks like; he’s asking whether perfection can survive contact with institutions, fear, grief, and desire.
I think The War for Heaven is best suited for readers of speculative fiction, afterlife fantasy, theological fantasy, supernatural adventure, metaphysical mystery, and character-driven fantasy who enjoy big ideas delivered with wit and emotional ballast. It may appeal to fans of Neil Gaiman’s mythic playfulness or readers who liked the cosmic irreverence of Good Omens, though Grisham’s novel is more earnest in its grief and more invested in the architecture of its world. The War for Heaven turns eternity into a place worth questioning, defending, and finally loving.
Pages: 349 | ASIN : B0GP93RYMC
Death and Coffee
Death and Coffee follows Prudence Barlow, a Puritan-era young woman whose mother is executed for witchcraft in 1661 Hartford—an injustice that leaves Prudence raw enough to bargain with something decidedly not holy. Centuries later she’s “Death’s representative” in 2024 New York City, hustling through an afterlife gig economy with a demon-horse ride named Goose, a glowing amulet that dispatches her to the newly doomed, and an Employee Handbook that reads like corporate cruelty turned into scripture. The novel ricochets between grim history and snarky modernity as Prudence collects souls, dodges petty reaper politics, and, most fatefully, falls for Daxone, a woman whose goodness hits Prudence like sunlight she didn’t realize she’d been missing.
My favorite thing about this book is its tonal nerve. Author Lisa Acerbo doesn’t sand down death into tasteful mood lighting; she lets it stink, joke, swagger, and occasionally ache. Prudence’s voice is sharp without being hollow, funny, yes, but also threaded with old grief that keeps resurfacing like a bruise you press even when you know it’ll hurt. And the workplace satire lands because it’s not just punchlines about policies; it’s about how systems (religious, civic, corporate, supernatural) metabolize human fear and call it “order.” Even the concept of depositing souls with routine, like taking out the trash after a shift, feels deliberately unsettling in a way that makes the comedy bite.
The romance is where the book quietly sharpens its claws. Prudence has been “alive” a long time, but emotionally she’s been running on fumes and caffeine, until Daxone. Their connection isn’t written as destiny-with-a-spotlight; it’s more like recognition, that rare moment when someone looks at your whole strange self and doesn’t flinch. The book makes a bold move in tying love to consequence. Prudence herself frames it with rueful clarity: “falling in love meant certain death,” and the detour they negotiate in the gray dampness of Purgatory feels less like a gimmick than a price paid for choosing tenderness over procedure. I also appreciated that the story keeps its secondary threads lively—reaper coworkers, territorial squabbles, and the looming sense that Death is watching, without letting them drown the emotional throughline.
This is for readers who want paranormal romance, urban fantasy, and dark comedy with a side of historical fantasy, and who don’t mind their magic served alongside content warnings and the occasional flinch-worthy image. If you like the bureaucratic afterlife mischief of Neil Gaiman (think Good Omens energy) but want it kinkier, bloodier, and more explicitly romantic, Acerbo’s lane will feel familiarly strange. Acerbo turns the afterlife into a workplace, and still makes it feel like a haunting.
Pages: 388 | ASIN : B0F3V7GD67
Scallywag!
Scallywag! is a swashbuckling historical fantasy adventure written as the “true-life” prison memoir of “Mad” Molly McCormick, who’s awaiting execution in Fort St. Ambrose and passing the days by writing down how she became a pirate. The story starts with her youth in Ireland and her decision to run rather than be married off, then follows her into a life at sea that begins with disguise, turns into capture, and quickly becomes something like chosen family on a pirate ship. From there it escalates into a chain of episodes: cursed islands with warnings scratched into a dead missionary’s journal, ghost towns that reset themselves every night, and a deepening entanglement with the merpeople, including a princess named Itaska who changes what “freedom” even means for Molly.
What I enjoyed most was how committed the book is to the voice. It has that old-fashioned “Reader, let me tell you” energy without feeling like a gimmick. Molly is blunt, funny when she wants to be, and surprisingly tender when she’s caught off guard by kindness. You see it in the way she talks about being locked up near the water, close enough to hear the waves but not touch them. Then, on the other side of the story, you see it in the warmth that creeps in when she describes pirate life as a patchwork family. I also liked author K. L. Mitchell’s choice to treat piracy less like nonstop swagger and more like a messy social system, with rules, bargains, and the constant math of survival. Even the “we’re legitimate” argument lands, because it’s said with a grin and a knife behind the back.
The supernatural pieces are where the book really has fun, and where the historical fantasy genre shows its teeth. The cursed-island section has that dry, salty dread that I like in pirate novels. The ghost-colony idea is clever too, not just spooky for spooky’s sake, but unsettling in a quiet way: the town resets, the food returns, and memory is the only thing that sticks. And when the story goes underwater, it becomes genuinely magical, from shell-grown “buildings” to courtly politics to warfare that involves trained whales and a leviathan-like beast that is basically a living shipwreck waiting to happen. The episodic structure can feel long at times. We’re carried from set piece to set piece. Still, I never felt lost. The emotional through-line, especially around loyalty and longing, keeps pulling you forward.
By the end, the frame story snaps back into focus in a way I found satisfying, with a wink of mystery about what happens to Molly after her memoir is “secured.” I’d recommend Scallywag! most to readers who like pirate yarns, lush sea lore, and historical fantasy that stays playful while still taking characters seriously. If you enjoy a strong narrative voice, found-family crews, eerie islands, and a dash of romance that feels earned rather than pasted on, this one’s for you.
The Most Magical of Worlds
The Floating Lake of Dressa Moore follows two university professors who embark on a scientific expedition to a mysterious floating lake where they encounter pirates, cursed crew members, ancient magical sources, and an empire that doesn’t like being questioned. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I always loved the idea of science and magic blending together in a logical way. Jonathan’s drive to understand magic at the most basic level is fascinating to me. I always felt that science would have a place in the most magical of worlds.
I find the world you created in this novel brimming with possibilities. Where did the inspiration for the setting come from, and how did it change as you were writing?
I wanted to write a magical fantasy novel, but have it border on the absurd, but still make some logical sense. What better way to start than a lake floating above the world? As I wrote the novel, I had to remind myself to ground every detail, no matter how nonsensical, in some way that made that detail believable.
In fantasy novels, it’s easy to get carried away with the magical powers characters have. How did you balance the use of supernatural powers?
That’s always difficult. Magical beings can do amazing and wonderful things. No one in Dressa Moore really understands magic. They just know how to cast a few spells here and there, and a lot of the time, they don’t cast them correctly. So, even though lots of characters can cast spells, no one is very good at it. Of course, that might change in future books.
Where does the story go in the next book, and where do you see it going in the future?
There are a lot of places to go for sure. There’s Marta’s story, and finding her way back home. Jonathan will continue to research magic, and who knows what he may find. William is on the brink of uncovering forgotten truths that could be both fantastic and cataclysmic, and there’s always Commodore Wilkes and the empire. Now that they are in Dressa Moore, I don’t think they are leaving.
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In an effort to unravel the mysteries of magic, and save their dying relationship, Jonathan Braxton and William Watts Worthwaddle have embarked on a journey to investigate the source of sorcery.
Their pursuit leads them to the skybound lands of Dressa Moore where a magical battle between a wizard and dragon sent the lake soaring into the sky. But the professors are soon entangled in a deadly game of global politics—pawns in a struggle between empires, gods, magi, constables, religious zealots, and anti-zealots.
Hunted from all sides, the professors race to conduct their scientific research. But they soon learn that science alone is no match for mysteries of sorcery and their research just might create a magical tsunami that could destroy the world.
The one question they never considered asking—should magic be researched at all?
