Gilbert M. Stack's Blog, page 58

Occultober Day 23 The Ghosts of Kali Oka Road by M. L. Bullock

Occultober Day 23 The Ghosts of Kali Oka Road by M. L. Bullock

For day 23, we are returning to the good old fashioned ghost story with The Ghosts of Kali Oka Road. This is not a perfect book, but man did I have fun reading it. The story opens with two high school kids parking on Kali Oka Road to make out. Instead, they end up having a fight. The girl jumps out of the car and the boy threatens to leave her. Then something terrible and seemingly supernatural happens and the girl’s wrist is suddenly dropped near her boyfriend followed quickly by her severed head. Panicking, as anyone would, the boy actually does the right thing—he races to the police with his story and ends up in psychiatric observation. No sign of the girl (or her severed body parts) are discovered and the young man spends the rest of his life under suspicion of having murdered her. But we know he didn’t—and he wants answers to what happened and the supernatural things he saw the night she died.

 

Enter Cassidy, a wealthy young woman who is haunted by the disappearance of her sister, and who is occasionally driven to paint her visions. This time when she paints a mansion in her dreams, she starts to experience what happened to a woman nearly two centuries ago. Her vision drives her to seek out a semi-professional group of ghost hunters calling themselves Gulf Coast Paranormal who are actually already looking into the mansion—which was on the road where the young girl was murdered in the first chapter.

 

Everyone in this story, the high school sweethearts, Cassidy and her ex-boyfriend, the two co-owners of Gulf Coast Paranormal, and most importantly, the ghosts on Kali Oka Road are having major relationship problems. I predicted this would be the key to solving the supernatural mystery but you’ll have to read the book to find out if I was right. What we definitely get is a supernatural problem that pulled me right in and kept me happy for every page of the novel. As I said in my opening statement, the story isn’t perfect. Everything isn’t tied together with a nice little bow and that means that I didn’t learn enough about a couple elements of the mystery, but I loved what M. L. Bullock gave me. The characters were fantastic and believable and the tensions their personalities generated really boosted the story. In addition, the supernatural elements really worked for me. And there are enough threads—plot lines not tied to the primary mystery—to have me eager to dive into the next novel.

 

I suspect we’ll see this series in Occultober again.

 

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01...

 

 

Occultober Day 22 The Pembroke Steel Series by Gilbert M. Stack

Occultober Day 22 The Pembroke Steel Series by Gilbert M. Stack

As we enter the fourth week of October we return one final time to my own work and my first paranormal series, Pembroke Steel.

 

Now that the Great War is done, ace pilot Mitch Pembroke just wants to spend a few peaceful years enjoying the Roaring Twenties before he settles down and takes the corner office in his father’s company, Pembroke Steel. Unfortunately, peace is the last thing Mitch can find. Trouble follows wherever he goes and not even his best friend, boxer-turned-bodyguard, Kit Moran can keep him out of all of it. Pembroke Steel blurs the line between historical fiction and dark fantasy—so you never quite know what you’re going to get—a horror story with a supernatural monster at its core, or one that only looks that way?

 

The Pembroke Steel stories were a lot of fun to write in a large part because I got to play with reader expectations in each and every tale. You can try them all for free on Kindle Unlimited, or purchase them at the same link on Amazon, starting with the opening novella, Lazarus Key.

 

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01...

 

Occultober Day 21 The Vampire's Mail Order Bride by Kristen Painter

Occultober Day 21 The Vampire’s Mail Order Bride by Kristen Painter

The Vampire’s Mail Order Bride represents the light side of Occultober where witches and vampires and werewolves aren’t actually all that spooky. It’s all the fun of Halloween without truly being scary. I thought hard about whether or not to include it in Occultober, but then decided that there is a place in the celebration for the little town of Nocturne Falls where this book and the ones that come after it take place

 

The plot is pretty straight forward. Our heroine, Delaney, witnesses a mob murder and has to run for it. While getting off the streets to hide, she stumbles into a business that arranges prospective matches between lonely men and women—a modern-day mail-order bride service. She steals a file and impersonates the bride-to-be thinking that if she can just get away for a few weeks she can figure out what to do about her mob problem.

 

On the other end of this relationship is a four-hundred-year-old vampire whose grandmother wants him to get married and have children so she can have some great-grandbabies. That, by the way, tells you another critical point about this book. Vampires are really just people with fangs. They aren’t evil. They don’t appear to have a particular strong bloodlust. They eat regular food in addition to blood in packets. And really aren’t vampires by most people’s definition of the word. Anyway, our vampire, Hugh, hasn’t gotten over the death of his wife four hundred years ago. And he’s angry that his grandmother is interfering in his life, but agrees to give the mail order bride she’s arranged for him a 30 day chance to win his heart.

 

As everyone reading this review has already imagined, the two fall instantly in love but Hugh fights his passion fearing that he will cause Delaney’s death as he did his first wife. Most of the problems—an ex-girlfriend, the mob—really aren’t problems at all. They are just foils to force Hugh to realize Delaney is the perfect woman for him.

 

And it works! Painter has assembled a charming little town that celebrates Halloween every day and it’s just a lovely setting for her light romance with a touch of supernatural for flavor. I include it in Occultober for those who like to flirt with the supernatural without getting into the violence and bloodshed that marks most urban fantasies.

 

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...

 

 

 

Occultober Day 20 American Monsters by Adam Jortner

Occultober Day 20 American Monsters by Adam Jortner

If you enjoy a good horror story (and everyone reading these Occultober reviews should), this book will teach you a lot about where those images come from in America, and how they have been cultivated over the history of the nation. It’s a very quick but fascinating read. In addition to looking at the historical roots of things like spirits and witches, Jortner also spends a great deal of time looking at how movies, televisions, and novels have shaped the images. The popularity of monsters, and the way that those monster stories are told, has a lot to do with the stresses, fears, and problems of American society. Therefore, it should not be surprising that racism and civil rights are often underlying themes of the monster tale. Another fascinating theme is whether or not we can really govern ourselves when the people in charge in the stories often show themselves to be idiots. American isolationism, the Cold War, the proper role of science in our society… all of these themes pop up again and again as do stories about what happens when teens or women start to get a little independence in our dangerous world. Each section fascinated me and my only complaint is that the book wasn’t longer.

 

So if you’d like to know what your love of horror, the supernatural, and urban fantasy says about our society, take a look at American Monsters.

 

https://www.amazon.com/American-Monst...

 

 

 

Occultober Day 19 Miss Knight and the Ghosts of Tsavo by Vered Ehsani

Occultober Day 19 Miss Knight and the Ghosts of Tsavo by Vered Ehsani

Here is a lovely urban fantasy set in the English Empire during the reign of Queen Victoria. It begins with one of the best opening lines I have ever read: “It’s an uncommonly known fact that a strong pot of tea will obscure a werewolf’s stench.” What follows is just as good as those first words. Miss Knight (or Mrs. Knight as she insists as she considers herself to be still married to her husband who has become a ghost) is a rather atypical adventuress. In many ways she struggles to maintain a façade as a proper Victorian lady, but in practice she is an agent of a society that investigates and regulates the paranormal—something she is well suited to do because of her peculiar gift to recognize the paranormal and speak with ghosts.

 

The plot of this book involves her and her adopted family having to travel to Africa after the father of the family’s poor investment strategy leaves them bankrupt. So much of this book reads like a colonial novel—the reactions of Miss Knight and her family to living in a part of the world very different than London society. The other part is an investigation into two ghost lions that are still killing people. It’s frankly a delightful story, sedately paced but never feeling overly slow. There are some nice surprises along the way and a great setup for the next book.

 

I’d like to say thank you to Amazon Top 500 Reviewer Charles Van Buren who brought this excellent novel to my attention on the Written Gems Discussion Group on Goodreads.

 

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...

 

Occultober Day 18 Diving into the Wreck by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Occultober Day 18 Diving into the Wreck by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

This novel doesn’t technically fit in Occultober, but it sure does read like it does. It’s a science fiction adventure that reads like a ghost story. The heroine, usually referred to as “Boss”, makes her living “diving” on old spaceship wrecks, exploring the detritus of 5000 years of humanity out among the stars. She’s an odd bird. When she was a young child, her mother and her entered a place called “The Room of Lost Souls” on an abandoned space station and her mother never came out again. Her father abandoned her to her grandparents who were less than happy to be responsible for a grandchild whose trauma had produced emotional issues. So Boss is very much a secretive loner making her living in a very dangerous line of work, bringing people around her only because it is necessary for safety in these dives.

 

The novel focuses on the consequences of finding a 5000 year old ship where it had no business being. It’s a ship with an abandoned military stealth technology that Boss’ nation is secretly trying to rediscover so it can pick up a stalled war with its major enemy. And that is the crux of the story. What is the stealth technology? How does it do what it does? And why does it horribly kill just about everyone who comes into contact with it—except Boss? Add in one of the galaxy’s worst fathers and a superrich businesswoman with her own set of daddy issues and you have a really exciting tale, yet none of that explains why this is a great story. I think that the novel succeeds not because of its fantastic plot and mystery, but because Rusch brilliantly creates the tone of an old-fashioned ghost story to reveal layer by layer what is going on as she tries to pierce the mystery of The Room of Lost Souls that sits at the heart of the entire mystery. Where do people who enter the room go? And is there any way for Boss to find her mother again?

 

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...

 

 

Occultober Day 17 It's a Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad World by Curtis M. Lawson

Occultober Day 17 It’s a Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad World by Curtis M. Lawson

How can bad be so much fun? If you’re curious, take a look at Curtis M. Lawson’s tale of two magical daggers that act as vampires, transferring the life, vitality, and soul of the person stabbed to the person doing the stabbing. Old people become younger and stronger. Injured people heal instantaneously. Sick people become healthy. All at the small price of being turned into a crazed homicidal maniac.

 

Naturally, most people don’t believe the legend behind the daggers is true. They just see extremely valuable artifacts of an earlier age. When the knives are sort of accidentally stolen, lots of people become interested in possessing them. Most initially want to claim the reward, but just about everyone gets seduced by the very real power of the blades. This makes for a madcap adventure in which large numbers of people are seeking the prize in a very dark parody of the famous comedy, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.

 

The truth is, I expected to like this book, but was surprised by just how quickly I fell in love with it. Lawson’s characters are fantastic—quirky (if not outright weird)—and many of them are really, really, bad. All of them are in over their heads. Watching people struggle to obtain or regain possession of these magic items was fascinating. Wondering who would ultimately survive made for a gripping and extremely fast-paced storyline. Honestly, my only problem with the tale was that it came to an end.

 

Fortunately, there’s a sequel.

 

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01...

 

 

Occultober Day 16: The Rules of Supervillainy by C. T. Phipps

Occultober Day 16: The Rules of Supervillainy by C. T. Phipps

Can something be spooky if it makes you laugh? I think you’ll agree the answer is yes if you give C.T. Phipps’ Supervillainy Saga a try. On the surface it’s the story of Gary, a troubled man who gets a package

in the mail that turns out to be the magical cloak of the recently deceased superhero, Nightwalker. Gary dons it and instantly decides to fulfill his lifelong dream of being a supervillain. He names himself Merciless—which really proves to be a terrible name because Gary is filled with mercy and concern for those around him even as he pretends not to care.

 

As one would suspect of a superhero story, Gary’s life is filled with melodrama and bizarre coincidences. His brother was a “c-grade” retired supervillain murdered by one of the new “tougher” heroes, starting Gary down his “villainous” road. Apparently every woman he’s ever dated is on the path to being a supervillain or superhero as well—and of course he runs into all of them. He’s constantly stuck between his desire to be “evil” and his hatred of the idea that the innocent get hurt which leads him to become what he calls an anti-villain with hilarious results.

 

Hilarious is a good word to describe the whole series. Many of the villains feel like they could fit in well on the set of the 1960s Batman series. The cloak is sentient and talks to him. His henchwoman (ex-girlfriend) thinks he’s the best boss in the world because he doesn’t want sexual favors. (Gary is happily married to a woman who wants to be a superhero.) His henchman and villainous mentor is a strangely honorable Satanist. And it gets weirder and weirder from there.

 

And yet, Gary/Merciless walks the dark magic side of the superhero genre. He encounters death (personified), vampires, zombies, a Cthulhu inspired monster, and that’s just the beginning. If you stop to really think about what he’s facing, it’s smack in the middle of the horror field, although Phipps is so dang funny that you’ll be laughing your way through even the nastiest of situations.

 

What comes through most clearly as you read or listen to this novel is how much C.T. Phipps knows about the superhero genre and how important it is to him. If good parody truly comes from love of your subject, I think Phipps has been engaged in a torrid romance with superhero comics for the last forty or fifty years.

 

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07...

 

Occultober Day 15 Blood Ties by Gilbert M. Stack

Occultober Day 15 Blood Ties by Gilbert M. Stack

One of the things that made Dracula so effective is that it began by taking an English man out of his normal world and placing him in what was effectively another world—Transylvania, which was described in almost medieval terms. I wanted to recapture that sense of helplessness that comes from being dropped into a foreign environment way outside a person’s comfort zone when I wrote Blood Ties. So, I take a capable lawyer with some baggage, throw in a grieving son who is not thinking very clearly, and rip their world apart in the ancestral home of the paranormal adventure. My tag line for this one is: In the quest for immortality, a relative is a terrible thing to waste.

 

Here’s the blurb: It seemed like such an easy case. All attorney Liz Dunn had to do was escort Ryan Hart to meet his long lost uncle in the tiny country of Carpathia on the Transylvanian border. Ryan stood to gain a ten-million-dollar estate. Liz wanted the hefty check that would keep her law firm in the black. But Ryan’s dying uncle, the enigmatic Stefan Carpathios, planned to get something far more sinister in return. In an ancient land where legends come to life, Liz is about to discover that the world is much more complex than she believed and a blood tie can be an exceedingly dangerous thing.

 

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07...

 

Occultober Day 14 Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell Shadows by James Lovegrove

Occultober Day 14 Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell Shadows by James Lovegrove

We’re sticking with the Cthulhu mythology for the fourteenth day of Occultober, but this time we’re throwing into the mix the most rational detective to ever grace the pages of literature.

 

Sherlock Holmes is renowned for his keen analytical mind and his amazing powers of deductive reasoning. He’s a detective totally grounded in the physical world. So, what would he do if he was confronted by a mystery not of this world? More to the point, what would he do if confronted by the mind-bending otherworldly entities of H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythologies?

 

If your first thought was—Holmes would either die quickly or go insane—this would not be a good novel for you. But if you think instead that after eliminating the impossible, he would turn to other explanations, no matter how improbable, then you are going to enjoy this book.

 

Lovegrove suggests that a significant portion of Sherlock Holmes’ career was spent protecting the world from the entities that humans weren’t meant to know, and this first novel was a compelling and exciting testament to that idea. I’d like to see more.

 

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01...