Tag Archives: thriller

Interview with Joseph Carrabis, Author of THE AUGMENTED MAN

Late Last Night Books
30 JUNE 2020 Interview with Joseph Carrabis, Author of THE AUGMENTED MAN

I had the pleasure of reading THE AUGMENTED MAN, a story of a US soldier with a stormy past. Author Joseph Carrabis delves into the psychological and physical aspects of warfare and its effects on the psyche of this soldier, Nick Trailer. Mr. Carrabis shared his thoughts on various aspects of his writing and reading with me.

What kinds of books do you read?
Well written. They’re getting harder and harder to find, though. But reader friends tell me I’m persnickety about what’s well-written. Genre doesn’t matter to me, nor does fact or fiction. But well written? I don’t yield on that one.

Who are your favorite authors?
The first who come to mind are Terry Melia (Tales from the Greenhills) and Joanell Serra (The Vines We Planted), both indie authors and both have amazing talent (I’m waiting for their next books).

Thriller, Mystery or Ghost Story: How Should We Label Elizabeth Brundage’s All Things Cease to Appear?

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When Stephen King writes a blurb for a novel, readers take notice. When a book is reviewed in the New York Times Book Review section, readers take notice. Let’s look at how Elizabeth Brundage’s fourth novel, All Things Cease to Appear, which was published in 2016, is being received by the reading public.

All Things has earned over 7,000 ratings and 1,000 reviews on Goodreads. That is very good, yet the book scores only 3.72 (out of 5)––not what one might expect. On Amazon, it does a little better with a 4.1 score, but from only 300 reviews.

What are the chief objections to the novel among Amazon and Goodreads reviewers? First, and least important in my opinion, is that she does away with quotation marks.

King Ludwig, His Castle & the Ludwig Conspiracy

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Reading The Ludwig Conspiracy, an historical novel by Oliver Pötzsch, opens up dark passageways into the side notes of history. The book itself is a fast-paced thriller with unexpected and persistent villains, both past and present. Published in 2011, eight years after Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, Pötzsch’s book also draws on secret codes and byzantine intrigues and superficially seems to ride Dan Brown’s wave.

You know King Ludwig II of Bavaria as “Mad King Ludwig,” who commissioned the building of Schloss Neuschwanstein, famous as the Disney World castle. He also built Schloss Linderhog and an imitation Versailles known as Herrenschiemsee. Ludwig was born in 1845 and crowned king in 1864. He was a Roman Catholic who struggled with his homosexuality and he was a patron of the composer Richard Wagner.

Introducing Guest Blogger John Vanderslice

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Introducing Guest Blogger John Vanderslice, author of Island Fog

John Vanderslice is our guest blogger for June 1st. Here, with gratitude to Jeremiah Chamberlain, the editor of Fiction Writers Review, who first published my interview with him, I reproduce our conversation, which dealt mainly with his linked collection, Island Fog.

A native of the Washington DC area, John Vanderslice has an MFA from George Mason University and a PhD from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette. After graduating from ULL in 1997, he began teaching at the University of Central Arkansas (UCA), where I met him when I began teaching there in 2004. John is a much-loved professor, and I was at once struck by the wit, the range, and the quality of his short fiction, which has been published in many leading journals, as well as several anthologies, including Chick for a Day and The Best of The First Line. 

DANGEROUS CHARACTERS

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23 FEBRUARY 2015 DANGEROUS CHARACTERS

2/23/15 DANGEROUS CHARACTERS BY SONIA LINEBAUGHElmerGantryCOVER

In 1927 Elmer Gantry was banned in Boston and denounced from pulpits across the USA.
Gantry was a hard-drinking, womanizing, college football player, who grew into a sometimes sober, womanizing, evangelist minister. The denunciations weren’t because ministers were suddenly being held to a higher standard—it was because the fictional Elmer Gantry was a character in a novel by American author Sinclair Lewis.

In 2008, the Swedish novel, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, knocked American readers out of Thegirlwiththedragontattootheir collective comfort zone. The story seemed to be about a journalist named Mikael, publisher of a Swedish political magazine, but several chapters in, readers’ imaginations got hijacked by “pierced and tattooed punk prodigy Lisbeth Salander.”