Sandra C. Lopez's Blog, page 305

Review: MEMOIR FROM HELL by Stephen Ross

First off, what a creepy cover! It just had that spooky eeriness that gives off that foreboding feeling―like this is going to be one hell of a ride. And the man on the cover looks like Hugh Jackman from his Van Helsing days. It just added to the darkness of this tale.
"I’d just turned four when the terror started. That’s my first memory of the horror that run through my life—until I become a man and stopped it. Maybe it started before, and my screwball mind erased it. I don’t know. But what I do know. I survived it. I made it." (8)
Jake Malloy was a young man that suffered an abusive childhood, which planted the root of hate inside him. It all started from his early days in Hellridge, South Dakota, where hell began.
The whole story is a narrative told by the main character as he speaks to a tape recorder. The way he speaks is the way the story reads―he jumps around, talking about events that are not necessarily in order. It's like he talks about whatever pops into his head. There's no flow to it. For example, one minute he's talking about Dorothy stopping by for a visit, how he doesn't remember the bus ride home, and that the doctors say she might get better one day; then he quickly segues to how his parents met.
Story is fairly slow as it mainly dictates the emotional and physical trauma of his childhood. The scenes often felt repetitive and they weren't really pushing the plot forward. There was just a lot of drunkenness, a lot of crying, a lot of beatings. The entire thing was just a slow and uninteresting summary.
My rating: 2 stars

Review: PAGE BY PAIGE by Laura Lee Gulledge

Rule #1: No more excuses! Buy a sketchbook and draw.


Meet Paige, an artist living in NYC. Lost, she feels like she’s surrounded by 2-dimensional people. I love the drawings!


Her story is a collection of drawings, dictating the struggles of an artist. What to draw? What to write? Then she realizes that drawing is her therapy, because she gets to throw what she feels out on paper.


New year, New city, New Paige.


A girl trying to find her way. “It’s up to me to grow my own beanstalk if I want to climb anywhere.”


Witty and relatable.
My rating: 4 stars

Review: DIARY OF A CONFUSED HARRY POTTER: THE COWARDLY WIZARD by Alex Pan

This is the story of Harry Potter—no, not that Harry Potter.


Harry’s been sent to a magic prison called Hogwartz. He’s good with a yo-yo, but he’s not a talented wizard.


The dialogue was open and honest, and I think it was actually better than the real Harry Potter books, although the kid did talk a little too much. The whole thing was written in a language that you could actually understand and relate to much better than the Harry Potter books.


Of course, there was far too much wizardry stuff for my liking, but the kid was fairly smart and witty. I also liked the drawings. 

My rating: 3 stars

Review: NUTSI WANTS TO CATCH THE MOON by Emma Paidge

Nutsi, the squirrel, likes to look at the moon. He has a terrible secret: he’s afraid of the dark. VERY afraid. So, along with his friend, he goes in search of a way to catch the moon.
Nutsi doesn’t really look like a squirrel. Instead, he was kind of a cross between the mushroom on Super Mario and the Southpark characters. Although they were cute, the illustrations were child-like. They were kind of stiff and lifeless, and the text could’ve engaged more with the pictures to create more vitality.
Story itself was okay, but I just think it could’ve been more entertaining with a better layout and nicer art.
My rating: 2 stars

Review: RUNNING FROM DUST by Jess Whitby

Image Graphic designed by Sandra Lopez





Jude Craig is a level-headed teacher in a Yorkshire secondary school. Within a matter of days her professional and personal life is shattered by a series of strange events in her house. What starts with the sound of papers fluttering to the floor quickly escalates to her discovering that someone has been in the house whilst she is sleeping. When Jude is driven out of her job and home she is forced to discover whether she is being haunted, stalked by a pupil, or the terrifying possibility that she is losing her mind.

Available on Amazon 








My review: Jude can’t sleep. Every night, she’s been waking up in a fright from the sounds she hears in the other room—the sound of paper rustling. Was it an intruder? But there was no one there. Perhaps it was her imagination. At first, she ignored it, but then the sounds continued.

Stalker, haunting…or insanity?
A speculative quandary with many possibilities.
The writing was simple, and Jude’s mystery was alluring. I mean, it could’ve been anything. The plot listed so many different variables that could’ve led anywhere. Was a student crushing on her? Was he watching her at night? Or was she just imagining all of this?
The whole point of this story revolves in trying to conclude whether this was a stalker, a haunting, or insanity. This was a nice, little mystery, provoking the reader to seek the answer to the story’s question; however, it didn’t really quite rise to the occasion. I thought it could’ve been more exciting, but instead it lagged in some areas with lengthy prose and far more details than was necessary. I also questioned whether the other characters’ POV contributed to the story, because, to me, it seemed irrelevant. Yes, they might’ve lent a small piece to the mystery as a whole, but perhaps they didn’t need to be too in-depth. Also, the simple cover doesn’t engage the intended audience as well as it should.
The author has a nice build-up toward the end as readers learn more of the nitty-gritty of this complex puzzle. Overall, story was pretty good, but I think it could’ve been better.
My rating: 3.5 stars 


- EXCERPT - 

Tuesday, 13 November – 1:18 a.m.Jude sat bolt upright in her bed. Oscar jerked his head, stirred by his owner’s sudden movement. He looked from her to the door, then back to her. Jude’s brain sped through a storyboard of images. Faster than a speeding, out-of-control train, she remembered the events of the night before. The sound. The paper. An intruder or her imagination? Remember—check the office in the morning. How did she forget all this? How could she be so stupid?
She held her breath and listened intently until her head began to hurt. Oscar sat up.
Silence.
Nothing.
Oscar gave a small whine. She waved at him to be quiet. Again, she listened. Silence.
Jude closed her eyes and laid back in the bed. Was she losing her mind?
The sound of a piece of paper falling to the floor broke the silence.
Jude jumped out of bed, took a step towards the door and stopped. This may not have been the best idea. What if there was someone in the office? What would she do? But how could she ignore this? She knew what she’d heard. And not once. It had been more than once. What the hell was going on? Frozen to the spot, Oscar looked on.
As if in reply to her hesitation, the intruder responded. The sound of another sheet of paper falling to the floor came from the office. Jude sprang into action. Not into the office but backward further into the bedroom. She switched the bedroom light on. The bulb illuminating the darkness with dazzling bright light.
“Hello?” Jude tried to sound confident but she could hear the slight wobble in her voice.
Nothing.
“I know you’re in here,” she continued, sounding more confident. “You have ten seconds to leave my house or I will phone the police,” she lied.
The phone sat on the other side of the room, on top of the drawers as it had last night. Out of arm’s reach. Damn.
“I’ve got the phone in my hand. I will dial.”

Review: ANYA’S GHOST by Vera Brosgol

After a miserable day at school, Anya falls through a hole and finds a ghost that can’t leave her bones. Upon getting rescued, she accidentally takes one of the ghost’s fingers in her book bag. Now, she has a ghost on her tail…literally.


Story had such comedic scenarios, like the ghost popping out her pencil while Anya was trying to take a test in school. Anya is a funny and spry girl, but, like any teenager, she often feels misunderstood and out-of-place. I loved how she faked a period just to get out of church. “You can check if you don’t believe me.” Ha, ha, ha.


The haunting story of the ghost’s murder was touching and illustrated beautifully. But when Anya agrees to solve the ghost’s murder, she soon realizes that the ghost was not telling the whole truth. The bubbling mystery explodes to a climactic ending with awesome renditions.


Witty and fun! Illustrations were awesome, and the humor was something right out of The Simpsons.


My rating: 5 stars

Review: LOST GIRL by Dax Varley

A young teen girl scries for a lost retainer and suddenly puts herself in search of a lost girl.

Being that she’s always been a little psychic, it all started with a vision and it all kind of came together from there. Who was she? Why did she look scared? Could she possibly be dead?
Short, sassy paranormal YA story!


My rating: 4 stars

Excerpt: SANGRE: THE WRONG SIDE OF TOMORROW by Carlos Colón

Hey, let’s face it. My track record of relating to women by the time I reached eighteen resembled the New York Mets’ won-loss record in the early 1960’s. Hell, my own mother died barely able to tolerate being around me. Add to that, my voyeuristic episode with Stacy Pepper and you could have branded an “L” on my forehead with a cattle iron without it looking out of place. I earned that motherfucker and I earned it hard. It was probably why I interpreted the pensive gazes Carmen, the super’s wife, gave me as sympathetic. She sure played the part well, pitying the suddenly unattended teen as he tried to figure out how to hold on to the apartment all by himself. Her husband Gilberto had been a good friend to me after Papi left, always being supportive of me while Mami drank herself to sleep on a nightly basis, presumably hoping to wake up to a world where Papi and Dani were back and I was the one that was gone. Gilberto even encouraged Carmen to invite me over for dinner after school every once in a while. That’s when I started to notice her leering at me across the table. Even though I was a month or so from being a legal adult, Gilberto looked the other way as I remained at the apartment on my own, refusing to move out to live with other relatives. And though he never verbalized it, he nodded with approval as I took a job to cover the controlled rent and registered for college at Hunter. I was becoming a man. And I was doing it on my own. Privately, he might have been curious as to why I wasn’t taking advantage of the situation and inviting a little feminine company to join me. Maybe he thought I was still mourning or maybe he thought I was just a good stand-up guy. Sorry, Gilberto. Stand-up guy I was not. Since Carmen was the super’s wife, she often took liberties with the spare apartment key and I would often come home from school to find my apartment tidied up, my dishes done and sometimes even my laundry folded. She wanted to help, she said, since I was alone and concentrating on my studies. And though I was a little weirded out, I have to admit that it was nice to sometimes not have those little things to worry about. There were even times when I would find little treats in the fridge like pasteles and flan. By throwing myself into studies and the job I had gotten at a local insurance and tax preparer’s office, I never really found myself going through a mourning period. School and work occupied my mind sufficiently enough that by the time I got home and crashed into bed, the only thoughts that squeezed into this freshman virgin’s head were visions of Channel 47’s Iris Chacón giving me a bronski with her giant ass cheeks (what can I say, I was a sick fuck). In late October of my freshman year, midterms were kicking my ass. On the last Friday that month, I came home after 8:30 p.m. exhausted from school and work. All I wanted to do was just throw myself into bed with my clothes on. Without turning on the light, I dropped my book bag on the floor and took off my coat, tossing it in the same general area. “Oye, dejaste de estar haciendo tanto reguero,” said the frisky voice from the bed, ordering me to not make such a mess. Although I quickly identified the voice as Carmen’s, it startled me enough that I shouted and flick on the light. Carmen, not one to miss her cue, lifted the covers that were draped over her when the room lit up, unveiling her au naturel self. “Avance,” she said, rushing me in Spanish. She only had ninety minutes before Gilberto returned home from his domino game. Now, Carmen was not the most attractive woman in the world. She was maybe about twenty pounds overweight, which I didn’t mind because I liked ladies that were big and curvy. But while that in itself might have kept her off the cover of Cosmopolitan magazine, her khaki-colored, cigarette-stained teeth and her pungent café-con-leche breath likely would have steered most discerning eligible men into other directions. Carmen also had a bit of a mustache that often made one feel like he was making out with Omar Sharif. Also worth mentioning was the fact that her legs were hairy and led up to a mound of fuzz that resembled the top of Kramer’s head being squeezed between her thighs (anyone who watches Seinfeld will understand what I mean). Despite the not-so-appetizing picture I described, when Carmen raised those sheets, I popped a woody that nearly broke my zipper. Carmen saw the enthusiastic bulge ready to break out and moaned “Ooh...” Happy to see such a willing participant, Carmen grabbed my wrist and pulled me under the sheets with her. Unfortunately for her, the 90 minutes she allotted were far more than we needed. I finished with 89 to spare. But virgin or not, Carmen wasn’t about to let me off the hook that easily. She pointed towards Kramer and put me to work. When I did, her thighs pressed so hard against my ears, I was halfway expecting my head to crack open like a walnut. Once my task was done, Carmen got dressed and told me she would return the next day. She said I needed the practice. And practice we did, at least five times a week over the next two years. To this day I fondly look back at those sessions as the best sex I ever had.


Available on Amazon

Excerpt: "My Strange Grandpa,” from SEX & TAIPEI CITY by Yu-Han Chao

I guess I wasn’t all that surprised when my mother told me that Grandpa’s caretaker, the Indonesian maid, had run away. As horrified as we were that a girl willing to leave her country for the purpose of making money was not willing to take care of Grandpa in exchange for good wages and room and board, we also felt vindicated. It seemed to excuse us for all our complaints about Grandpa.My Grandpa has been living with us for as long as I can remember, since Grandma died. I heard that when I was little and he wasn’t as senile, things weren’t so bad, but honestly, for as long as I recall, Grandpa has been something of a skeleton-in-the-closet for my family.            He’s like any other eighty-something-year-old grandfather, except he’s exceptionally demanding, even for a Taiwanese elder, and worst of all, he watches the Japanese porn channel at a high volume all day in his room. When I was in elementary school I asked my mother if I could bring some friends home, but she always suggested that we go to McDonald’s or the park instead, and even went as far as giving me three hundred NT just to make sure we would entertain ourselves outside the house.“It’s not good to disturb your grandfather,” she said in a troubled tone.“I don’t think Grandpa minds,” I said, thinking she was mean, but pocketing the money anyway.Now, of course, the reason we couldn’t have my little girlfriends over was because my mother didn’t want my classmates to hear the weird noises coming out of Grandpa’s room. I didn’t know what they were at the time, and was actually more or less used to them. I’d accidentally seen him watching it a few times, just Japanese people being dramatic about taking baths together—they were often not dressed, so that’s how I understood it.When I was in third grade, Grandpa tried to explain to me where babies came from. He brought me to his room, where he had the Japanese channel playing, and told me about the different parts on a boy and a girl and how they fit together when the boy is excited. My mother interrupted, knocking on the sliding Japanese doors.“Lille, are you in there? Father, have you seen Lille?”“I’m in here, Mom,” I called back. “Grandpa’s teaching me about sex.”I said this, not quite understanding everything, though I had at least been able to learn the word “sex.” My mother rushed in, grabbed me by the arm, and pulled me with her all the way to the kitchen.“Forget what your Grandpa said. He’s really old and sometimes old people say strange things,” she said, stuffing an orange into my hands.I ate the orange and soon forgot about it, although whenever I passed Grandpa’s room and heard the wailing or moaning noises, I wondered if it had something to do with sex. When in fifth grade I finally learned in Health class how sex worked and understood exactly what Grandpa was watching hour after hour day to day, I asked my mom why nobody never at least requested that Grandpa lower the volume on the television, or just quit watching it.“It’s too embarrassing,” she said. “Your father won’t have anything to do with it. Nobody wants to mention to him that we know what he’s watching. And we don’t know how he will respond. He may think we are making him lose face.”“But he’s your father,” I said.“You can complain to him if you want,” she said, flailing her arms.


Bio: 
Yu-Han Chao was born and grew up in Taipei, Taiwan. She received her MFA from Penn State, taught at UC Merced, and recently became a Registered Nurse. The Backwaters Press (an imprint of University of Nebraska Press) published her poetry book, and BOAAT, Dancing Girl, and Another New Calligraphy published her chapbooks. Red Hen Press published her story collection, Sex & Taipei City, in April 2019. She maintains a blog about writing and nursing at www.yuhanchao.com.

Review: WEREWOLF NIGHTS by Mari Hamill

 Image Graphic designed by Sandra Lopez
Threatened by financial ruin, widowed bakery owner Catherine Mercy leads a solitary life with more interest in reading about werewolf lore than in finding a man. Her one true love disappeared after high school and her now deceased husband kept her trapped in the house claiming that a werewolf might hunt her down one day, just as her grandmother repeatedly warned her. When Hollywood interrupts the town's monotony by shooting a werewolf movie on location, Catherine's best friend Anne pushes her to audition. Already in her thirties, Catherine feels ridiculous trying to become an actress, but lands the leading role.
Catherine's daily routine turns into a hair-raising adventure as fame begins to surveil her wanderings and she falls for her sexy costar Greg Byron despite this actor's neon warning sign that flashes conceited womanizer. He's also smitten by her, but just when they are about to find happiness, a wolf bites him.
While Greg's features turn lupine, Catherine discovers a resemblance between the movie script and her family's history. Frightened, Catherine recruits werewolf expert Steve to figure out if the movie's werewolf legend is real and if Wolfern, the werewolf her grandmother dreaded, has finally come for her. If so, Greg will turn into a werewolf. Only undoing Greg's curse and destroying Wolfern before the next full moon can save their love and their lives.
Mari Hamill blends fantasy, intrigue, and passion to create a chilling, unique story.
Available on Amazon


My review: First off, let me just say that I love the cover illustration. I'm always a sucker for a good illustration, and this one reminded me of the ones I used to see in a Tales from the Crypt episode.
Catherine is a bakery owner and in a stalemate in the dating scene. To her, "dating brought more pains than joy." (LOC 241)
Being a Werevillian and living in a town that had festivals celebrating werewolves practically dedicated Catherine's whole live to the shifting dog.
"The moon is like a yellow werewolf fang biting the heavens." (LOC266)
"Love had proven scarier than werewolves." (LOC305)
Evidently, Catherine had a warning that a wolf man might come looking for her. Then a strange man comes into town and somehow Catherine gets casted for the movie, Werewolf Nights, prompting her to gain the attention of a movie star, who seems to have a dark side.
At this point, I'm thinking that we're finally going to get some answers here. Instead, all I got was more ambiguity and a lengthier prose.
The werewolf lore was interesting. Writing was smart with blends of dark poetry and historical lessons. The story might've combined elements of mystery, horror, and classic noir. It definitely had that masking allure that attracts the reader like a moth to a flame, but I just couldn't get past the lack of clarity. The way it reads made me wonder if this was a town of real werewolves. It certainly sounded like it sometimes. The whole thing was just too complicated, which was further exacerbated by various characters coming in and out of scenes, removing the focus from the main character. I just didn't like it as much as I thought.
My rating: 2 stars