Blog Archives
Journeys Through Heartbreak
Tango with Ghosts follows a 72-year-old Canadian who escapes to Buenos Aires only to encounter the ghost of a poet and tango dancer, drawing him into a haunting mystery rooted in his apartment’s secrets and Argentina’s buried history. How did you research this difficult period of Argentine history?
Most of my research was done using Google; however, there are many people who had family and friends who were taken away. I did many interviews with family members and relied on their stories.
What was the most challenging aspect of writing Reginald’s emotional journey?
Reginald represents a major part of society that journeys through heartbreak and loss. Many of these people don’t recover; they live in the past and feel there is no real future, whether it is divorce, death, or depression.
If readers remember one idea from Tango with Ghosts, what would you like it to be?
Get off the comfortable chair of self-pity, acknowledge nothing will last forever, and embrace the moment.
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Buenos Aires, 2006. He came to hide. Behind him, a shattered marriage and a sold business in Vancouver. Ahead, a year of solitude in a grand, unsettling apartment on Calle Talcahuano.
He meant to write. He avoided the city’s midnight milongas, because he knew too well what lives inside the tango: the unbearable art of holding what you are bound to lose. But some impulses can’t be buried.
Then he discovers a thirty-year-old manuscript by Alejandro Vargas, a writer disappeared from this very building during the military dictatorship. Vargas’s final meditations on dance, death, and the courage to stay become a mirror.
Pulled into the slipstream of the apartment’s past, he is drawn back into the embrace, toward a woman haunted by her own secrets, and toward a truth the city has kept hidden for three decades.
Some cities bury their dead. This one dances with them.
Tango with Ghosts
Bruce R. Hampson’s Tango with Ghosts is a supernatural historical novel about Reginald Emanuel, a seventy-two-year-old Canadian who arrives in Buenos Aires hoping distance will quiet the wreckage of his marriage. Instead, his apartment on Calle Talcahuano greets him with strange music, shifting photographs, hidden messages, and the lingering presence of its former owner, the poet and tango dancer Alejandro Vargas. What begins as one man’s attempt to disappear becomes an absorbing search through a building’s secrets and Argentina’s buried history.
Tango gives the novel its language and its heartbeat. The embrace becomes a way of thinking about love, grief, mortality, and the courage required to remain present when every instinct says to retreat. Hampson clearly understands the dance from within, from the codes of the milonga to the nearly invisible exchange of weight and intention between partners. His Buenos Aires feels equally intimate: humid streets, aging cafés, wooden dance floors, rattling elevators, and an apartment that breathes, remembers, and occasionally loses patience with its tenant.
The mystery reaches beyond the apartment into Argentina’s Dirty War and the lives of those who were disappeared. Through Alejandro, his daughter Elena, the poet Miguel Santoro, and the watchful building manager Jorge, the novel explores the complicated moral inheritance left by terror. These characters carry secrets, guilt, anger, and unanswered questions, yet Hampson keeps returning to the human choices inside that history. Elena is especially compelling, both as a daughter trying to understand her father and as a woman who has made dancing an act of survival.
There’s a warm, insistent generosity at the center of Tango with Ghosts. It believes people can tell the truth after decades of silence, reconnect after years of absence, and step back onto the floor after a fall. The novel’s ghosts aren’t simply there to frighten Reginald. They ask him to witness, to feel, and finally to live. Haunting, tender, and alive with the pulse of tango, this is a novel about holding the past close without letting it stop your feet.
Pages: 216 | ASIN : B0H7YPKL87
Dominique’s Journey / A Mystical Quest Through Love, Loss and Becoming / Per Asperum in Lucem
Dominique’s Journey, by D. J. Pratt, is an ambitious historical and spiritual adventure built around one man’s search for meaning, love, and a truth he can sense long before he can fully understand it. Beginning in 16th-century Europe, Dominique Guillaume follows a path set in motion by Léonide, the mysterious woman whose brief presence changes the direction of his entire life. His travels carry him through the Holy Roman Empire, the Ottoman world, Persia, and eventually India, and Pratt gives each stage a purpose beyond changing the scenery. Dominique is constantly being reshaped by the people he meets, including lovers, friends, teachers, soldiers, mystics, and family. What starts as a physical journey gradually becomes an examination of identity, faith, connection, and the possibility that some relationships reach farther than a single lifetime.
One of the book’s most interesting choices is the amount of time it gives Dominique to change. His transformation doesn’t happen through one revelation. He learns through friendship, desire, danger, grief, religion, language, discipline, and years of occasionally frustrating spiritual practice. That gives the novel an unusually patient rhythm. The later sections at Shambhala become especially immersive as Dominique works through the Purple Lotus and its chakra-based veils under the guidance of Leela Devi. There’s a lot of Hindu, yogic, Buddhist, Sufi, and mystical terminology here, but those ideas are woven directly into Dominique’s experiences. Leela’s journal entries are also a smart addition because they let us watch Dominique’s transformation from outside his own head. More importantly, they turn what could have been a solitary enlightenment story into something more emotionally complicated as teacher and student become increasingly bound to each other.
Readers of Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist will recognize some familiar territory. Both novels follow a traveler who leaves the life he knows because something deeper seems to be calling him, and both treat chance meetings, intuition, love, and apparent coincidence as parts of a larger spiritual pattern. Dominique’s Journey, though, takes that basic idea into a much larger and denser world. Pratt spends considerable time on history, competing religious traditions, sexuality, philosophy, reincarnation, and the mechanics of spiritual awakening. Dominique’s repeated idea that he’s becoming an event within the universe captures the book particularly well. The journey isn’t simply about arriving at Shambhala. It’s about watching an identity slowly become porous enough to connect with other people, other traditions, and ultimately the larger fabric of existence.
I liked the way the novel links love to transformation. Léonide motivates Dominique’s journey, Avice and others teach him different forms of intimacy and connection, and Leela eventually becomes inseparable from the spiritual culmination of his quest. By the time Dominique reaches the final veil, the book has spent decades of his life preparing for a choice between release and return, so his decision carries real thematic weight. The epilogue then reaches backward and forward through time to reshape what we thought we understood about Léonide, Dominique, and the mysterious bond connecting them. It gives the story a circular quality that suits its recurring images of threads, waterwheels, rebirth, and lives crossing across time. Dominique’s Journey is the kind of historical fantasy that wants adventure, romance, philosophy, and mysticism occupying the same space, and its strongest moments come when all four finally converge. For readers who enjoy philosophical historical fiction, the novel’s depth and layered exploration of spirituality, history, and identity will be part of its appeal.
Pages: 456 | ASIN : B0HFM6ZMT7
Recipient of the Literary Titan Book Award
Cosmic Acquaintances
Helium centers around a guarded young woman who slips into the orbit of a roadside refuge for people entranced by flying saucers and cosmic messages. Why did you choose the late 1940s as the setting for Joan’s story?
I never really had a choice. History dictated the story’s time frame. The strange little commune in which Helium plays out was a real place called Palomar Gardens. It sat at the bottom of a long, winding mountain road running up to the newly constructed Palomar Observatory. It was where a would-be spiritual guru named George Adamski reinvented himself as a purveyor of universal truths supposedly revealed by cosmic acquaintances from other worlds. He became the most famous member of a small cadre of earthbound messengers known as the “contactees.” These were people who claimed not only to have witnessed flying saucers, but to have met the extraterrestrial ebeings who piloted them. Adamski’s stay at Palomar Gardens stretched from the 1940s to the 1950s, so there was never really any question in my mind that that was when Helium should take place.
Joan is both skeptical and deeply longing for something beyond herself. How did you develop that tension within her character?
It was a slow and meandering process. When I started to write Helium, I had only a vague idea of who Joan was. As time went on, I became convinced that she should embark on a search for hope—one based on a conviction that anything, no matter how unlikely, is possible. I also knew that I wanted to put her in conflict with a fictionalized version of George Adamski, even if I wasn’t sure at first what the basis of that conflict should be. Eventually, I decided to create in her a deep longing rooted in a fantastical “gift” that parallels the metaphysical aspects of the 1950s flying saucer craze. The parallels initially strengthen Joan’s relationship with George before resulting in a rupture of betrayal and comeuppance.
How much research did you do into postwar California, Palomar Mountain, and early UFO culture?
A lot. I started researching America’s mid-century flying saucer phenomenon during the mid-1990s. Over time, I became something of an amateur expert in what’s admittedly a rather obscure subject. I made two trips to Palomar Mountain. With my background in television, I originally aimed to turn my research into a documentary. That went nowhere. Then I tried other things: a screenplay, a blog, a podcast. Each time, utter failure. Finally, I turned to fiction. Bingo! It took three decades, but my flying saucer obsession has finally resulted in something solid: this novel called Helium.
What do you hope readers are still thinking about after they finish Helium?
While writing Helium, I took unexpected comfort in exploring the intersections of hope and uncertainty. I like to think that at least some of my readers will come away feeling something similar. Helium takes place during a historical period when it seemed like everyone was seeing impossible things in the sky. I’m not sure the things they saw were extraterrestrial, but what if they were? If the impossible is possible, if mystery can exist alongside certainty, then maybe we have the excuse we need to stop doom-saying and doom-scrolling. Maybe there are answers we’re still unable or unwilling to see. I hope that when readers put down Helium, they will at least be more willing to entertain those possibilities.
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Joan has a gravity problem-and she’s desperate to keep it hidden. Haunted by a loss too heavy to bear, she drifts to Palomar Gardens, a tiny Southern California commune where hope hovers and teases. Here she encounters George, a charismatic mystic whose lofty visions will soon captivate the world.
Drawn into George’s orbit, Joan finds her footing. But the line between wonder and deception is thin, and her hold on reality slips. Improbable machines appear in the sky, only to vanish without explanation. Beautiful lies masquerade as truth. Her secret unmoors with consequences she cannot foresee.
Helium is a story of faith, folly, and the fragile human longing to touch the stars-of searching for a place in the cosmos where the possible and the impossible carry equal weight.
The Eleventh Messiah
The Eleventh Messiah is a post-apocalyptic speculative novel with strong religious thriller elements, following journalist Sarah B. Wells as she travels through a ruined America to find Elijah, a man some call the eleventh Messiah and others call a fraud. What begins as an investigation into one possible false prophet becomes something more personal and unsettling. Sarah knows Elijah from before the war, and through him, she is pulled into a world of broken cities, desperate believers, armed followers, rival preachers, and people searching for meaning in the wreckage. The book asks a big question in a battered setting: when the world has fallen apart, do people need truth, faith, comfort, or simply someone who will look them in the eye and see them?
Sarah is sharp, profane, funny, wounded, and observant in a way that makes the ruined world feel lived in rather than staged. She notices the smell of smoke, the absurdity of people charging money to see a broken TV screen, the old habits that survive even after civilization has cracked. I liked that the book doesn’t make her reverent too quickly. She comes in with skepticism, which gives the story its pulse. Elijah might be holy. He might be damaged. He might be something science has not learned how to name. Sarah keeps circling that uncertainty, and because she does, I trusted the novel more than I would have if it simply demanded belief from me.
The author makes a bold choice by blending blunt, street-level narration with heavy spiritual and philosophical questions. The novel is interested in God, consciousness, miracles, war, language, propaganda, trauma, and the strange hunger people have for someone to tell them what their suffering means. Caleb, as Elijah’s opposite, gives the book a strong dramatic engine. He understands performance, certainty, and fear. Elijah, by contrast, resists language even as everyone around him tries to turn him into a symbol. I found that tension compelling. At times, the book’s ideas are direct, but the stronger moments are the quieter ones, when a touch, a look, or a small act of mercy says more than a sermon could.
I would recommend The Eleventh Messiah to readers who enjoy post-apocalyptic fiction that is more interested in belief and human nature than in survival mechanics alone. It’ll appeal to people who like speculative novels with a philosophical edge, religious thrillers that question faith instead of simply affirming it, and character-driven stories about what people cling to after catastrophe. It’s messy, searching, angry, hopeful, and at its best, deeply human.
Pages: 172 | ASIN : B0H43KCBM9
Long Leg: From the Blighted Earth: Book II
R.M. Tembreull’s Long Leg: From the Blighted Earth: Book II is an ambitious work of environmental fantasy that blends mythic adventure, eco-fiction, and climate fiction into a sweeping speculative tale. Set in a damaged world where the Natural Order struggles against Chaos and the Force Corrupted, the novel moves north into the Great Plains and centers its conflict on drought, water, ecological collapse, and the fragile bonds that connect all living things. It’s a book with large stakes, but its emotional pull comes from small, unlikely heroes carrying the fate of the world on their shoulders.
At the heart of the story is Long Leg, a Gifted burrowing owl whose loyalty to the earth elemental Okaraxta gives the novel both intimacy and purpose. Through Long Leg’s journey, Tembreull turns animals, elementals, fungi, water, wind, and land into active participants in an ongoing struggle for balance. The result is a richly imagined mythic fantasy world where the natural world isn’t just scenery; it’s alive, wounded, watchful, and capable of resistance. The book’s use of Lakota-inspired themes, especially the idea that all beings are related, gives the story a spiritual framework that feels central to its identity.
The novel’s strongest quality is its sense of scale. Tembreull writes with the scope of epic fantasy while grounding the story in recognizable environmental concerns: drought, wildfire, overuse of water, disappearing habitats, and humanity’s troubled relationship with the planet. Water becomes both a sacred presence and a force of renewal, which gives the adventure a clear emotional and thematic current. The prose is often expansive and philosophical, but that style suits a story designed to feel like a legend, a warning, and a quest all at once.
Readers who enjoyed Richard Adams’s Watership Down may find a familiar appeal here: animal protagonists move through a dangerous world shaped by forces larger than themselves, and their courage matters because they’re vulnerable. Tembreull’s book is more overtly supernatural and environmental in its focus, but it shares that sense of small creatures becoming central to a vast struggle. The journey also carries the feel of an eco-fantasy quest, where survival depends not on domination, but on cooperation, memory, sacrifice, and respect for the living world.
Long Leg is a thoughtful and imaginative speculative fiction novel for readers who appreciate mythic worldbuilding, animal-centered adventure, and environmental themes woven into epic fantasy. It’s not simply a story about a broken world; it’s a story about connection, responsibility, and the possibility of restoration. Tembreull delivers a distinctive continuation of the Blighted Earth series, one that invites readers to care deeply about the smallest beings and to see the natural world as a powerful, sacred community.
Pages: 338 | ASIN : B0GVPT5DMM
Sacred Crossroads: The Path Appears When You Take The First Step
Sacred Crossroads, by Mitch Russo, is a metaphysical fantasy novel about Noble Manning, a practical hardware store owner in Cedar Springs, Massachusetts, whose carefully ordered life begins to crack open when the family store reveals itself as something far more mysterious than a small-town business. Through Noble, his daughter Sarah, Jenny Martinez, Rosa’s legacy, and the strange pull of Manning’s Hardware, the book explores grief, family inheritance, spiritual awakening, and the courage it takes to step into a larger truth.
What I liked most is that the novel treats transformation as both magical and deeply human. Noble’s resistance feels familiar. He wants numbers, ledgers, systems, and proof. Honestly, I understood him. There is comfort in shelves being labeled and life behaving itself. But the book keeps pressing against that comfort, asking what happens when the world is bigger than the tools we use to measure it. The hardware store is a smart central image because it keeps the story grounded. Hammers, keys, wood, registers, and old ledgers. Ordinary things. Then Russo lets them hum with meaning. That mix gives the book its strongest texture.
The writing leans into wonder, sometimes so much that the message comes through very clearly. This is not a quiet literary novel that hides its themes in the shadows. It wants to talk about awakening, purpose, fear, and becoming. Still, there is sincerity here, and that counts for a lot. I was especially drawn to Jenny and Rosa’s thread because their wisdom feels lived-in rather than abstract. Their story gives the novel heart and history, and it helps balance Noble’s more internal struggle with a wider sense of community and inheritance.
As spiritual or visionary fantasy, Sacred Crossroads will most appeal to readers who like fiction with an open heart and a clear sense of purpose. It’s a good fit for people drawn to stories about awakening after loss, small towns with hidden magic, family legacies, and the idea that everyday places can become thresholds. Readers who enjoy reflective, meaning-driven fiction will likely appreciate its warmth and invitation. I’d recommend it to anyone standing at a personal crossroads, especially someone who wants a novel that feels less like an escape and more like a nudge toward courage.
Pages: 218 | ASIN : B0GGNRK2TC
One Cathartic Moment
Sage of the Mountains follows a broken blacksmith who journeys into the mountains in search of a sage, hoping to get a fresh start, and discovers that the path to healing requires confronting the self he’s been trying to escape. Why did you choose to tell this story as a fable rather than a traditional self-help book?
I chose to tell this story as a fable because real change doesn’t come from information alone. It comes from lived experiences. The journey Folly takes through the mountains is a mirror of our own inner journey that we all face when we’re trying to let go of the past and find peace.
I’ve always been drawn to self-help, but I’ve noticed something: even when the advice is excellent, it often doesn’t stick. It stays in the mind, but it doesn’t change me. A story, on the other hand, goes deeper. It allows us to feel the struggle, the resistance, and the transformation.
It’s like sitting in a classroom. After a few months, most of us won’t remember the bullet points the teacher says will be on the test. But we will remember an interesting story from the teacher about the topic. That’s what I wanted to create here. Instead of telling readers what to do, I wanted them to walk the path with Folly, experience it for themselves, and hopefully carry those lessons into their own lives.
What does the mountain represent to you beyond the obvious symbolism, and do you believe everyone has a “mountain,” and if so, how do we recognize it?
The mountain isn’t just the thing we are trying to avoid. It represents who we are capable of becoming.
Everyone has a mountain to conquer, but each person’s will be different. Some are about loss, failure, or even a realization that something isn’t working anymore, while for others, it can represent striving to be the best version of themselves.
We recognize it by what we resist the most. It’s the thing we keep avoiding but know we need to face. That tension, that pull and resistance that we feel, that’s the mountain we must face.
What is the most misunderstood idea about healing that you wanted to address?
To me, it’s that we believe too much in the Hollywood ending, that one cathartic moment brings a person back to reality. It doesn’t. Healing is gradual, and relapses are ever-present.
What do you hope someone in a difficult season takes away from Folly’s story?
That what they’re going through may have some purpose, even if they can’t see it yet. Sometimes it’s just realizing how much other people truly show up when everything has fallen apart.
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A story about losing everything…and finding yourself.
After losing the life he worked so hard to build, Folly finds himself in ruins with no direction, no certainty, and no map of where to go next. Drawn by whispers of a reclusive Sage that dwells high in the mountains, he sets out on a journey that he hopes will piece him back together. What he doesn’t yet understand is that transformation demands he face the very things he has tried to outrun and question the identity he constructed to protect himself.
Sage of the Mountains is a modern inspirational fable for those standing at a crossroads. In the spirit of symbolic journeys like The Alchemist, Siddhartha and The Celestine Prophecy, it unfolds slowly—inviting reflection, stillness, and a deeper listening in a world that rarely pauses.
We all have a mountain that we must conquer in our lives, something that is holding us back from becoming who we wish to be. For readers navigating loss, doubt, or the courage to begin again, Sage of the Mountains is more than a story—it is a mirror for your own path.
Your climb begins here.
