Blog Archives
Eros and Order: Love That Creates and Destroys
Carl Parsons’s Eros and Order: Love That Creates and Destroys is a literary fiction story collection about love in its many unstable forms: romantic love, marital love, possessive love, moral love, social duty, desire, grief, and rescue. The stories move from a collapsing marriage to a murder shaped by obsession, then into a tender but uneasy attempt at saving someone from despair, before widening into immigration, communication, and historical memory. As a work of literary fiction, it is less interested in neat comfort than in the pressure people put on one another when they confuse love with ownership, salvation, escape, or control.
Parsons doesn’t rush. He lets conversations unfold, sometimes at length, and he gives his characters room to argue themselves into corners. It made the book feel less like a set of twists and more like a series of moral tests. The title story, especially, has a classical weight to it, with its references to ancient order, vows, betrayal, and consequence. At times, I felt the author was almost standing beside the characters, asking them, “Are you sure this is freedom? Are you sure this is love?” That can make the prose feel old-fashioned in places, but not carelessly so. It has a formal, almost stern rhythm that fits the book’s concern with discipline, disorder, and the damage caused when desire becomes the only law.
I also found myself reacting strongly to the author’s choices. Some characters speak in ways that are blunt, and the stories are not shy about judging certain kinds of behavior. It made me pause and think more than once. But I think the collection works best when it lets the tension remain messy. “Perfect Girl” moves like crime fiction, but beneath the crime is a sharper look at beauty, male entitlement, and family corruption. “No Good Deed” turns toward rescue and hope, though even there Parsons keeps asking whether love can actually save someone or whether it can only offer a place to begin. “I Am Zico” is short and painful, and its direct first-person voice hits differently from the longer domestic dramas. It feels like the book opening a window and letting colder air in.
Eros and Order is a thoughtful and often compelling collection for readers who like literary fiction with moral stakes. It would especially appeal to readers who enjoy character-driven stories about relationships, consequences, crime, and social order, rather than fast plots or easy answers. It asks you to sit with flawed people, watch them make damaging choices, and consider what love creates when it is patient, and what it destroys when it becomes selfish. Readers who appreciate reflective fiction with a classical sensibility and a serious view of human behavior will likely find a lot to think about here.
Pages: 142 | ASIN: B0GZ3HQNV4
With A Chilling Touch of Authenticity
An Imprint of Evil and Other Hauntings is a collection of ten horror stories centered around cursed objects, hungry gods, and terrible choices. What draws you to the horror genre?
As a kid, I grew up reading EC horror comics and watching TV programs like ‘The Twilight Zone’ and ‘The Night Gallery.’ In my early teen years I started reading classics like Dracula and Frankenstein. I was just drawn in by such stories that slowly create a feeling of unease in the reader. Although supernatural in nature, they echo with a chilling touch of authenticity. And that’s what makes them so frightening.
Many of the stories begin with familiar situations before slowly turning sinister. Why do you think ordinary settings make horror more effective?
It’s the creeping uncertainty about what is real or true in ordinary situations that brings about the more subtle feeling of dread or fear, an unsettling feeling that lingers with the reader well after the story has been read.
Horror can easily become overly graphic or overly abstract, but your stories stay focused and concise. Was restraint an intentional stylistic choice?
Yes. I wanted the stories to build up slowly, with subtle hints along the way that not is all what it seems to be. These are stories that lean on the classic atmosphere of the Victorian-era spinechiller stories. Stories that were meant to be read out-loud by candle light on dark winter nights.
Which story in the collection was the most enjoyable or unsettling for you to write?
Enjoyable – would be ‘The Barn’. It’s my first folk horror story and I actually felt sorry placing the main character in such a desperate situation!
Unsettling – would be ‘Charles Linkwood’. It was difficult to read about the horrors experienced by WWI soldiers while doing my research for the story, and how many returned home as broken lads suffering from ‘shell shock’ (PTSD). I tried to capture some of that horror in my story.
Author Links: Amazon | GoodReads
The Miners’ Cat & Other Stories
The Miners’ Cat & Other Stories follows Soot, a stray black cat rescued from a coal shed and folded into the lives of Ron, a miner, and Mabel, whose small Midlands home becomes the warm center of his world. Told through a series of linked, nonlinear stories, the book moves between school trips, sausage prizes, snowy yards, pub visits, Christmas performances, and quieter reckonings with grief. Beneath the gentle adventures is a deeper pulse: the ache of vanishing mining communities, the tenderness of chosen family, and the way memory keeps a lamp burning long after the street has changed.
The book’s charm doesn’t come from grand spectacle but from chipped green paint, coal dust, fish suppers, duffel bags, Jaffa cakes, and the old rituals of ordinary care. Soot is sweet without being saccharine, and Ron’s gruff affection gives the stories their best emotional weather. I especially appreciated how the book allows sadness to sit beside humor. A lost PE kit, a runaway rat, or a pop shop can make room for laughter, yet the shadow of Mabel’s absence gives the collection a tender undertow.
Lizzie Jayne writes as though nostalgia is a landscape: smoky skies, pit wheels, frosted pub windows, washing lines, and streets that remember more than they say. The sentiment is full-hearted, but that openness feels true to the book’s purpose. It wants to preserve a world before it is swept clean by time, and it does so with sincerity, dialect, and a lovely attention to the small consolations that help people carry on.
The illustrations are a major part of the book’s spell. The watercolour images have a soft, weathered feel: red-brick houses, lamplit snow, black-cat silhouettes, smoky horizons, and rooms made holy by firelight. They don’t merely decorate the stories; they deepen their feeling. I liked the way Soot often appears as a dark, watchful shape against pale snow or warm windows, making him feel both tiny and mythic, like a little soot-smudge guardian of a whole community.
The target audience includes children, families, cat lovers, nostalgic adult readers, and anyone drawn to historical fiction, animal stories, illustrated short stories, cozy fiction, and grief-and-healing stories. Readers who enjoy the gentle animal-centered warmth of James Herriot or the homely emotional world of Paddington will likely find a similar comfort here, though this book carries a distinctly coal-dusted Midlands soul. The Miners’ Cat & Other Stories is a tender book that I heartily recommend.
WORLD OF WORLDS
Richard Scott Sacks’s World of Worlds is a literary action-adventure short story collection that follows young, restless travelers, reporters, climbers, drifters, and idealists across Africa, Europe, India, and the United States between 1968 and 1981. The book gathers fifteen stories shaped by travel, political unrest, culture shock, danger, and moral pressure, with much of its world centered on the turbulence of the late 1960s and 1970s.
I came away feeling that Sacks is less interested in adventure as spectacle than in adventure as a test of character. That surprised me, in a good way. The stories have movement, and sometimes real peril, but the strongest moments often happen in the quiet after the danger, when a character has to sit with what they have done, avoided, misunderstood, or lost. The writing feels alert to place. Rivers, roads, mountain air, crowded rooms, border crossings, and decaying outposts don’t just sit in the background. They press on the characters. They wear them down. The prose has the confidence of someone who has carried these landscapes in memory for a long while.
What I found most compelling was the author’s choice to keep the characters young, often proud, often naïve, and not always easy to like. That gives the book its bite. These are people who want freedom, meaning, escape, or a story worth telling, but they keep running into systems and histories much larger than themselves. Colonial aftermath, corruption, racial violence, war, and personal ambition all move through the collection without turning it into a lecture. Some stories are more direct politically, while others work through mood and tension. I appreciated that mix. Its pace can be reflective, and its moral questions are not neatly packaged. I liked that. Life on the road rarely comes with clean lessons.
I would recommend World of Worlds to readers who enjoy literary short fiction with an adventurous edge, especially those drawn to travel writing, political fiction, and stories about outsiders trying to understand places they can never fully possess. It will appeal most to readers who like their action grounded in atmosphere and consequence. For me, the collection works best as a map of uneasy encounters, both with the wider world and with the self.
Pages: 264 | ASIN: B0GX2Z6MJV
The Uber 1%
The Uber 1% by Bob Ford is a satirical short story collection about the wealthy, mostly the “Uber Rich,” with a few ordinary and filthy rich characters mixed in. The book moves through a world of country clubs, affairs, social punishment, vanity, money, and status, often returning to Centerport as its main stage. It is clearly working in the genre of social satire, with short fiction used to expose how ridiculous people can become when image matters more than character.
I liked the sharpness of the writing. Ford likes big personalities. Asher, Isadora, Angeline, Tolova, and the others are drawn with a kind of amused cruelty, but the comedy usually lands because the characters keep revealing themselves without realizing it. That is the fun of the book. People say the wrong thing, chase the wrong prize, marry for the wrong reason, and then act shocked when the bill comes due. Some scenes feel almost like gossip overheard at a club lunch, polished just enough to become fiction.
The book leans into exaggeration. At its best, the excess feels intentional. The names, the brands, the clubs, the houses, the affairs, all of it builds a world where money buys comfort but not wisdom. Sometimes the satire is broad, even blunt, but I think that bluntness fits the target. These are not quiet interior portraits. They are comic takedowns of people who have confused wealth with worth.
I would recommend The Uber 1% to readers who enjoy social satire, linked short stories, and fiction that pokes at privilege with a grin rather than a whisper. Fans of sharp, class-conscious comedy and country-club absurdity will probably have the best time with it. It’s a funny, biting look at people who have almost everything, except self-awareness.
Pages: 307 | ASIN: B0GTF4KYRT
Poetic Mind 2: The Collection
Poetic Mind 2: The Collection felt to me like a long, earnest conversation between bravado and vulnerability. Across poems about self-belief, grief, love, fantasy, war, exhaustion, and social cruelty, John Nevel keeps returning to the same central impulse: to turn pain into encouragement, and imagination into a kind of shelter. The book moves from the chest-thumping creative comeback of “Return of the Machine” and “Born a Legend” into more tender and wounded terrain such as “Shadows,” “PTSD,” and “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” then loops back toward resilience in poems like “Like a Phoenix” and “Change.” What held it together for me was that sense of a mind trying, over and over, to wrestle darkness into language and come out with something useful for another person.
What I responded to most was the book’s emotional directness. Nevel isn’t coy, and he isn’t interested in hiding behind irony. When “Shadows” lingers with the dead through scent, television reflections, and the strange comfort of almost-seeing someone again, it has a real ache to it; when “Take My Hand” and “Keep Your Head Up” insist on dignity for the lonely, the poor, the traumatized, and the judged, the tenderness feels lived rather than borrowed. Even the poems that lean hardest into uplift carry some friction under them, because again and again the speaker sounds like someone who has actually been bruised by the world he’s trying to repair. I liked that sincerity.
The collection is at its strongest when the swagger relaxes and the image gets room to breathe. The blizzard in “Snowfall,” the resurrected beast of “Revenge of the Dragon,” the handmade panic and recovery in “Destruction of Words,” and the barracks-to-Iraq movement in “Operation Iraqi Freedom” all gave me something concrete to stand inside. At the same time, the book’s habits are very clear: it loves repetition, declarative endings, motivational refrains, and an almost performative intensity. Sometimes that gives the poems a pulse and a stage voice. Even when I found the rhetoric a little relentless, I rarely doubted the conviction behind it. And I did admire how fully Nevel commits to his ideas, especially his belief that poetry should comfort, testify, and push back against humiliation, prejudice, and despair.
Poetic Mind 2 is heartfelt and thought-provoking. It’s not a chilly, mannered collection that wants to be admired from a distance. It wants to reach across the table, grab you, and tell you to keep going. I think that urgency is the book’s identity. I’d recommend it most to readers who like accessible, emotionally candid poetry, especially anyone drawn to themes of resilience, recovery, faith, military memory, and everyday encouragement. This is a book for readers who want poetry to mean what it says.
Pages: 193 | ASIN : B0GSKK2TWC
The Woman in the Third Floor Front
Richard Scharine’s The Woman in the Third Floor Front is a story collection arranged in sections: Utah, Law and Order, Past Lives, and Close to Home, and it moves through romance, regional fiction, political reflection, memory, family, and elegy with unusual ease. The title story opens with Jack, hobbled after a motorcycle crash and freshly divorced, stumbling by chance into a stopover town where an airline delay, a widow who runs a hotel and massage business, and a child grieving his father turn accident into reprieve; elsewhere, the book ranges from a journalist’s reckoning with western land politics in “When I Go, I Leave No Trace” to intimate, family-centered pieces later in the volume that turn more openly autobiographical and reflective. What binds the collection is Scharine’s interest in people who are no longer where they thought they would be, yet are still trying, stubbornly, to make a livable meaning out of the remainder.
What I admired most was the book’s tonal confidence. Scharine is willing to let a story be earnest without turning syrupy, and willing to let intelligence arrive wearing ordinary clothes. In the title piece, music is not decoration but structure: standards and country songs keep surfacing as emotional evidence, almost like witness testimony, and by the time Constance answers “He’ll Have to Go” with “He’ll Have to Stay,” the scene has become both a small-town performance and a public act of choosing life again. I also liked the collection’s tolerance for crookedness, for wounded people, compromised people, people who embarrass themselves before they improve. Jack is not noble at the outset; that matters. The redemption here is not glossy. It limps. That gives the best stories a hard-earned warmth rather than a prefab glow.
Scharine sometimes overexplains a motive or theme just after dramatizing it well, and now and then the narration steps in with a teacherly finger raised when the scene has already done the work. But even that has a strange charm, because it feels continuous with the book’s larger personality: learned, conversational, unembarrassed by references to songs, politics, Shakespeare, journalism, and grief all sharing the same table. I came away feeling that the collection’s real subject is not plot but afterlife in the secular sense, the second act after divorce, bereavement, disillusionment, professional diminishment, or the long weathering of a place. Several later pieces deepen that feeling by turning toward kinship, memory, and haunting, making the book less a display case of separate stories than a cumulative meditation on what remains.
I’d recommend The Woman in the Third Floor Front to readers of literary fiction, short story collections, regional fiction, character-driven fiction, and contemporary historical fiction who like humane books with a little grain in the wood. Readers who admire the plainspoken emotional intelligence of Kent Haruf, or the way Elizabeth Strout lets ordinary lives carry uncommon weight, will probably find familiar pleasures here, though Scharine is more discursive and more musically inclined than either. This is a book for people who believe stories can be rueful, civic-minded, romantic, and haunted all at once.
Pages: 164 | ASIN : B0GGF1V3BC
