Michael Patrick Hicks's Blog, page 15

Audiobook Review: Night Society by Ambrose Ibsen

Night Society

By Ambrose Ibsen






My rating: 3 of 5 stars


My original NIGHT SOCIETY audiobook review and many others can be found at Audiobook Reviewer.

Walking past an abandoned house, Mike is struck with inspiration to form a small club called the Night Society. He and his friends, Russell and Jim, agree to take part, and the plan is to break into the house and scare one with another with a spooky game of show and tell. During their inaugural meeting, Russell plays for them a CD of an audio file he downloaded from a torrent site, filling the house with the noise of a woman’s brutal murder. In the days that follow, the three men are witness to sights they cannot explain and they begin to realize they are being haunted by the victim whose violent death they had recently listened to.

Although I had initially suspected Night Society of being little more than an imitative riff on The Ring, Ambrose Ibsen does a fine job taking this story in a novel direction after building up a number of suspenseful scenes, along with a few moments of genuine creepiness, pushing the narrative toward a downbeat and desolate finale that works suitably well. Although Night Society isn’t particularly groundbreaking or original, Ibsen arranges the story’s familiar tropes in some crafty ways and kept me engaged. A lot of this engagement stems from his three central characters, whose point of view Ibsen alternates between from one chapter to the next in round-robin fashion. Each are affable losers content to lazily coast through life with little in the way of aim, with Jim being the group’s resident jackass and quick to chide Russell, a man-child whose apartment contains far more role play games and miniature statues than furniture. Mike is the most level-headed, but the strain that follows their first disastrous meeting of the Night Society becomes readily apparent over the course of this audiobook’s not-quite six-hour runtime.

Having listened to a number of Joe Hempel’s prior readings, Night Society fully met my expectations on the narration front. Hempel has a natural style, and his narration always makes for a smooth, easy listen. The production is professionally handled with no hiccups to speak of, and the audio is crisp and clear.

Night Society was my first encounter with Ibsen, and although it’s not a particularly unique or original find within the horror genre it is solidly entertaining and kept me interested throughout. I’ve little doubt that I will be giving this author another look in the future; in fact, knowing that Hempel has narrated a number of Ibsen’s other titles makes it a downright certainty.

[Audiobook provided for review by the audiobookreviewer.com]



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Review: Blood Standard by Laird Barron

Blood Standard (An Isaiah Coleridge Novel)

By Laird Barron






My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Blood Standard might be one of the best crime thrillers I've read in recent years, and while I'd put Isaiah Coleridge in the vein of a Jack Reacher-like protagonist, Laird Barron produces a work of violent noir that wins on its own merits and kept me hooked the whole way through.

Isaiah Coleridge is a Maori/Caucasian-mixed hitter for The Outfit, a mafioso crime syndicate that has assigned him to Alaska to keep the men there from getting into too much trouble. In the book's opening moments, Coleridge ends up making trouble of his own when he's brought into the fold for a sadistic seal hunt that ends with him attacking a made man. After one of The Outfit's higher-ups cashes in a favor, Coleridge finds himself exiled to the Adirondacks in upper New York. Needless to say, trouble once again finds Coleridge when a local girl goes missing, and Isaiah quickly finds himself caught in the crosshairs of the law, mobsters, and warring street gangs. Given the amount of scarring that covers Coleridge's body like a roadmap, this is just another day in the life of Isaiah.

Coleridge is a great big mountain of a man, and violence runs in his blood. Lee Child fans will feel right at home here, although Coleridge is more introspective and philosophical than Child's wandering former MP. College educated, Coleridge is as book smart as he is street wise, fascinated by ancient Greek myth, and the histories of Odysseus and Hercules lend plenty of thematic weight to Blood Standard. Barron's protagonist is one clearly cut from classical cloth, but his wiseguy mouth keeps him firmly rooted in the modern day. Isaiah is an incredibly well-drawn tragic hero, and one with plenty of tough guy wit, as well as a few moments of self-depreciation.

Barron weaves in moments of introspection between a good number of brief action scenes and plenty of tension, surrounding Coleridge with a number of clearly untrustworthy figures with questionable reputations. Coleridge is also given a few well-rounded foils in the love-interest, Meg, and partner-in-crime-cum-heroics, Lionel, a hard-drinking ex-military sort. Isaiah's scenes with these characters help to inform his growth as a man seeking to turn over a new leaf and set his life right. His history, his brushes with death, his exile from The Outfit, and his own firmly established moral code have left Coleridge grasping for a new life, and we get plenty of glimpses of what that life could be, the promises it could hold for him if he does right, how quickly it could fall apart if he steps wrong, and how badly anybody who crosses him will get hurt.

Laird Barron has crafted a terrific new character here, and half-way through Blood Standard I found myself already jonesing for the next book. I'm excited by the prospect of Coleridge's new life and focus, and I'm dying to see what future odysseys ensnare and disrupt him. This is a character that has plenty of legs for a series, and lots of layers left to mine in subsequent entries. And since I've gone and compared Coleridge to Reacher already, let me just say here for the record that I like Reacher a lot. But I like Coleridge a whole lot more.

[Note: I received an advanced copy of this title from the publisher via NetGalley.]



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Bookstagrams!

Quick post for today! I thought I'd share some recent Bookstagrams I've been posting over on Instagram. Head over there to give me a follow if you're not already! There's plenty more bookish photo fun to be had, and more on the way.

A few recent additions to my burgeoning collection of @wordhorde books.

The Demise of Kindle Worlds and Why Diversification Is So Damn Important (or, Amazon Isn't Your Best Friend)

Wednesday afternoon I received an e-mail from Amazon notifying me they were shutting down their Kindle Worlds brand. For those that may be unaware, Kindle Worlds is essentially a property that Amazon has licensed from the respective creators for other authors to write in. I don't believe any of those stories were considered canon, and the Kindle Worlds stories fell somewhere between media tie-in fiction and fan fiction that bore (to some degree) a staple of authenticity due to the vetting of submitted stories by Amazon and the license holder(s). I had heard rumblings that the cancellation of Kindle Worlds was coming within the indie author community over the last few weeks, and had been waiting for Amazon to confirm. 

Now that I have that confirmation, it's safe to say I'm pretty disappointed. In 2016, Amazon established a Kindle Worlds domain for Nicholas Sansbury Smith's best-selling Extinction Cycle series. Nicholas invited me and a number of authors to write the line's debut stories to help launch the Kindle Worlds branch of his Extinction Cycle, and Amazon paid us a nice advance to help us recoup cover art and editing costs, in addition to our monthly earnings generated by the sales of our titles. I'd been a reader and fan of Nick's work for a while, and we'd grown to be friends online over the years. Having the opportunity to put my own little mark on this particular series of his was both an honor and a hell of a lot of fun. I'm really proud of how From the Ashes turned out, and it's been one of my most consistent selling titles, bringing me in some revenue each and every month since it was released in October 2016. 

From the Ashes will be going out of print effective July 16, per Amazon. It's only May right now, so the book is still on sale and rather reasonably priced at only $1.99. I encourage you to check it out, particularly since the clock is ticking. You'll want to buy it as soon as you can and keep it on your Kindle for prosperity's sake! 

I'd also like to remind you, particularly if you're an independent author, author-publisher, small press publisher, or even just an Amazon customer, of something we sometimes overlook. Yes, Amazon provides us (usually) wonderful service, a bevy of wonderful shows and movies on its Prime video service, great discounts on products, and they opened up the door for indie authors such as myself to distribute their work for real cash money and find and build a readership. But, it's important to remember one simple fact.

Amazon is not your friend.

Amazon is a business, and a very competitive one at that. They're a book-selling powerhouse, one that has ground the vast majority of its serious competitors into the ground. Do you remember Walden Books, B. Dalton Booksellers, or Borders? Do you know where they are now? They're all gone, dead and buried. Barnes & Noble is the last of the big chain brick-and-mortar booksellers, and they're in serious, serious trouble. While their faults are numerous and they have certainly proven stubborn in their failure to improve over the years, they're just about on their way out of this world forever from the looks of it. Once they're gone, Amazon's only competition are the small independent bookstores, used booksellers, and mom and pop shops. I guess Books-A-Million is out there, but I think there's one or two in my whole state and I have no idea how they are nationally. They're certainly easy for me to overlook anyway.

Amazon has certainly done a lot of good for its customers, and it holds the top retailer spot for a reason (of course, earning a profit of more than $5 billion and paying zero in federal taxes helps mightily...). But let's not ever forget that Amazon is also strangely draconian, some might say tyrannical, as well as wildly uneven, in the application of its policies, which oftentimes sees innocents caught in the crossfire. Amazon recently changed its policies on who can leave reviews and certain criteria they must meet (such as spending $50 before they're allowed to review) before those customers can write a review. The aim here was to crack down on fake or paid reviews, a noble goal to be sure, particularly since virtually anybody could leave a one-star review on any product regardless of whether or not they've bought the item in question or ever even used that product or read that book. For instance, groups who fancy themselves Star Wars "fans" have attempted to wage war against Del Ray and its Star Wars authors by posting one-star reviews of this publisher's new books, typically following a script to hit on particular bullet points that they believe are destroying their childhood and any chance whatsoever at a happy, successful life. Amazon even kicked off 2018 by deleting fake and trolling reviews for Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House after Hillary Clinton's What Happened was bombarded with fake reviews the previous September. Fake reviews are an epidemic on Amazon, and some unsavory indie author types have been scamming the system by bribing reviewers with gift cards in exchange for glowing five-star reviews.

Obviously, shit like this needs to be stopped. But the end result, more often than not, is that legitimate reviewers are the ones receiving punishment. While I haven't had reviews deleted, I have noticed that even though I've spent way more than $50 at Amazon this year, my reviews are almost constantly withheld from posting for days, sometimes weeks, at a time. A large amount of my reading time is devoted to ARCs, or advanced reading copies, that publishers send me either directly or that I request from NetGalley. When I review those books, it's as an unverified purchase on Amazon, which likely accounts for why my reviews are so routinely delayed for odd amounts of time. I'm fortunate, though, particularly since Amazon recently began shutting down customer's accounts, believing those customers were leaving fake reviews, banning them from shopping at the online store. The Kindle Unlimited service is plagued with scam artists, and rather than root out these evildoers, Amazon has instead stripped legitimate authors of their rankings, made their books invisible to potential buyers browsing the sales charts, and in some cases froze authors out of their publishing account. David Gaughran has been writing about this for years, and if you're unfamiliar with all the problems inherit to KU and Amazon's unresponsiveness, you'd do well to check out his blog.

Given all the various press associated with these issues from bloggers like Gaughran, and news outlets like The Washington Post, Amazon is very clearly aware of these fundamental flaws in their daily operations. And yet they're awfully quick to ban, giving customers and authors little in the way of a hearing to plead their cases. There is no innocent until proven guilty with Amazon policies, and Amazon has made one thing crystal clear over the years in their responses to such abuses and their hamfisted tackling of these issues: they do not care.

Amazon is not your friend.

True, though, that Amazon has given writers an incredible opportunity to self-publish, and they most certainly did revolutionize independent publishing, regardless of your thoughts on how granting literally anybody the opportunity to write and publish their work may or may not be a double-edged sword. The Kindle is an incredible device, and I use my tablet on a daily basis. But one must also recognize that what Amazon giveth, Amazon can taketh away. Case in point: Kindle Worlds.

Look, being invited to write a Kindle Worlds title was an amazing opportunity for me. I cannot stress that enough. To be invited into an author's sandbox and have the opportunity to be exposed to that author's built-in audience was incredible, and readers of From the Ashes have treated me very well. At the moment, From the Ashes has 25 reviews with a 4.3 average star rating (out of 5 stars). Readers have called it "Brutal apocalyptic fiction at its best" and that it was a book that kept them "on edge until the last sentence" and that "fans of military sci-fi/horror shouldn't hesitate in picking this up." I'd like to think I stayed true to Nick's style of storytelling in his Extinction Cycle books, and that I kept readers engaged with plenty of action and monster mayhem. It's certainly a book I'm proud of, and I'm a bit sad that it will be going extinct (pardon the pun).

Whatever reason Amazon has for shuttering Kindle Worlds is known only to Amazon. Maybe the line as a whole wasn't selling well enough for them, maybe licensing all the various Worlds got too expensive, or maybe they just didn't want to spend the time and money maintaining it. I'm sure there are sound, rational business decisions behind all this, but this move highlights another very important thing for authors and publishers to keep in mind when it comes to doing business with Amazon. Don't get complacent. Remember, there are still other retailers out there.

No doubt, Amazon is the biggest and most prominent retailer around. However, there are still a few other options, at least in terms of ebooks. iBooks, Kobo, Google Play, Nook (for now), and Smashwords are significantly smaller channels for authors and publishers to sell their books at, but they do represent markets of potentially untapped readers begging to be engaged. The loss of Kindle Worlds should remind people of the dangers of putting all their eggs in one basket. Any writer who was solely dependent on selling their Kindle Worlds titles on Amazon are going to be hurting. And if the day ever comes that Amazon decides to change, overhaul, or eliminate their Kindle Direct Publishing, a lot of authors who have bought in to Amazon exclusivity in order to gamble on Kindle Unlimited are going to have to adapt or die. What happens when Amazon decides KDP is no longer benefiting their bottom line? It could happen. It might even happen soon. Or maybe not at all. But one question you have to consider is, how badly do you want to risk your authorial career in order to stay in Amazon's good graces? Because, trust me, Amazon doesn't give a shit about being in your good graces at all. Amazon is going to do what's good for Amazon, everything and everyone else be damned.

 

Make no mistake: the loss of over 600 more bookstores would be a cataclysmic blow to literacy and reading and empathy in America. We need Barnes & Noble. We need all bookstores, indie and chain. Pure and simple, we need books. https://t.co/uBGKAta4pL

— Chris Bohjalian (@ChrisBohjalian) May 7, 2018

 

We cannot continue to put all our eggs in one basket. We have to diversify in order to survive. This goes for readers as much as it does authors. You can buy all you want from Amazon, but it's important to support local business, too, to help your neighborhoods and your neighbors thrive. Personally, I don't want to imagine a world without bookstores, but we're getting shamefully close to such a view regardless. I buy plenty of ebooks from Amazon, but I also buy plenty of physical books from local shops, my local Barnes & Noble, and specialty presses like Thunderstorm Books and Cemetery Dance. We need a plurality of sellers, and it's important to support them with our dollars. Amazon is not the be-all, end-all of retail commerce, nor should it be. Authors, publishers - If we want to reach readers, we have to go to where those readers are. And yes, Amazon is the lion's share of the market, but there's absolutely no reason to be exclusive to them, especially given how potentially disastrously perilous Kindle Unlimited could be. Being exclusive to Amazon is little more than a case of diminishing returns in the long run. You're better off selling your work on all platforms in order to reach the maximum amount of readers possible. And if the worst comes to pass, you won't be caught flatfooted when Amazon bans you, closes out your account, prevents you from publishing, or decides to pull out of the indie publishing game to focus solely on their own publishing imprints.

As an author-publisher, you cannot rely on one single distributor, regardless of how much more money you make off that particular retail channel. Admittedly, the bulk of my sales come directly form Amazon, but I still move a few copies every month on every other channel, copies that obviously wouldn't have sold if I didn't have my books there. It seems like a no-brainer to me. I want to reach the most readers I can, so I have books for sale right here on this site, in addition to making them available on Amazon, B&N and Nook, Kobo, Google Play, iBooks and iTunes, Audible, in paperback, ebook, and audiobook. All simply because I don't want to be dependent on one retail outlet selling one format. I want to reach every reader I can, wherever they may be, in whatever format they prefer.

Kindle Worlds is closing, but I'll survive because I have other titles available in a variety of formats on all the retailers available to me. From the Ashes is going out of print, and yeah, that sucks, but that's the nature of publishing. Publishers close, imprints fail, books go out of print. It happens. The key is having enough of your toes in the water that you can keep on swimming, and remember that you don't have to stay in one stagnant little pond forever. 

Review: Terror Is Our Business: Dana Roberts' Casebook of Horrors by Joe R. Lansdale and Kasey Lansdale

Terror Is Our Business: Dana Roberts' Casebook of Horrors

By Joe R Lansdale, Kasey Lansdale






My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Terror is Our Business collects the Dana Roberts stories, previously published elsewhere, into a single volume, along with a new story, “The Case of the Ragman’s Anguish,” that is exclusive to this story. The book is split pretty evenly, with the first half devoted to stories written solely by Joe R. Lansdale, with the back-half featuring stories co-written by Joe and his daughter, Kasey Lansdale.

Inspired by works from Algernon Blackwood, William Hope Hodgson, and the mid-1970s TV series Kolchak: The Night Stalker, Lansdale presents a female investigator who specializes in the supernormal. An atheist (yay! Let's hear it for atheist representation in horror!), Dana does not believe in the supernatural, and believes that there is a scientific explanation for all those things that go bump in the night that we merely do not yet understand.

For the Joe Lansdale stories, the setup is simple - Dana is a guest at a men's club, invited to share a story as a paid speaker. Her stories are transcribed by one of the gentlemen, who includes an intro and outro that each of Dana's stories are couched between. I'm typically not a fan of such framed narratives, but it's a literary tradition Lansdale invokes here, along with a deliberate writing style, to pay homage to those earlier influences. While the stories are well-told, ultimately I found the narratives to be a bit stuffy and old fashioned for my tastes, in addition to formulaic. Each story follows a very episodic three-act format, with its introduction of the characters and the initial problem at hand, some examination of the supernormal conceit, typically a haunting of some sort, followed by a tidy resolution. None of the stories break this mold or shake up the story presentation, although the last three stories do carry a fresher sense of energy with the injection of Kasey Lansdale's sensibilities.

Following Kasey's introduction to this collection, we are introduced to a woman named Jana, initially in a stand-alone story focused solely on her encounter with the paranormal, before joining Dana's investigations for the final two casebooks. Jana is a bit more my style - she's fun, witty, has a bit of mouth on her, says things without thinking, and is pretty much always in way over her head. Dana, on the other hand, is very reserved and proper, an upper-class sort of personality. Jana is her Watson to Dana's Holmes, and becomes our window into the world of the supernormal for the collection's back-half. Once Kasey and Jana hit the pages, the stories become livelier and Dana finally has a counterpoint, a polar opposite, to act against. The burgeoning friendship between these personalities present an entertaining foil. The last two stories present supernormal threats that are also unabashedly Lovecraftian, which hit a particular sweet spot for me. While Jana presents an airier narrative voice than the stuffier gentleman author transcribing a moneyed ghost hunter's adventures, the introduction of cosmic threats really tickled me, even if the stories still follow the by-now well-established Dana Roberts' Casebook story formula.

All in all, Terror is Our Business: Dana Roberts' Casebook of Horrors is a largely delightful introduction to this investigator, but it took a while for me to connect with the work as a whole. It's not really until the last couple stories that everything began to click for me, and it's clear that Kasey Lansdale's influence was key to the development of Dana Roberts and helped give the series a fresher perspective. I do hope to see more of Dana and Jana, as well as Joe and Kasey as collaborators, in the future though.

[Note: I received an advanced copy of this title from the publisher, Cutting Block Books.]



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Review: Aetherchrist by Kirk Jones

Aetherchrist

By Kirk Jones






My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Rey is a door-to-door knives salesman, meandering through life as much as the neighborhoods he wanders selling cheap cutlery, hoping to bed his boss and to get his coworker to stop showing him his penis. While attempting to make a sale in the backwoods of Vermont, he comes to a home filled with analog televisions. On the screens is Rey - Rey walking down the street, Rey standing before the television, Rey laying dead on channel 13. Initially he suspects the townspeople of recording him, but as strange occurrences, and murder victims, begin to stack up, Rey quickly finds himself in way over his head, caught up in a chain of events he could have never imagined.

Aetherchrist is my first trip through the surreal mind of Kirk Jones, an author of weird fiction whose bibliography includes titles such as Uncle Sam’s Carnival of Copulating Inanimals and Masturbatory Entropy. If you ever wondered how The Matrix might have turned out if written and directed by David Cronenberg and David Lynch, with maybe a touch or two of uncredited, off-screen Act I consultation from Chuck Palahniuk, Aetherchrist may be the answer. Filled with surrealism, hints of conspiracy and secret worlds, moments of science fiction-fueled body horror, and the power of analog signals, this one's a bit of a head trip.

Jones plunges readers straight into his weird little world filled with oddball characters. For being less than 150 pages, Aetherchrist feels quite a bit denser thanks the big and bizarre ideas taking center stage following America's move from analog broadcasts to digital television. We're given hints and peeks into hidden subcultures and rogue movements who possess startling power, but much of it is a sideways glance, filtered through Rey's own ignorance and paranoia - he's an Everyman narrator who knows about as much as we do and is oftentimes just as lost and confused. Although the narrative is straightforward, the topics of discussion and peculiar details of the story itself are strangely oblique and mysterious nonetheless. To his credit, Rey at least seems to understand this on one level, noting that not only does everything in his life go wrong, it goes wrong in the most absurd ways possible.

Aetherchrist is a high-concept read, with philosophical questions of fate and destiny and how much control we really have over the events in our lives kind of lurking around the margins, touched upon but never deeply explored. In between the strange happenings occurring from page to page, there's plenty of ancillary fodder left to mentally chew on, like collectivism versus individuality. Readers who need a strong, definitive finale may be a bit disappointed at the abrupt conclusion and the niggling threads of story left unanswered (threads that are perhaps, more accurately, unanswerable), but Jones's narrative is more about the trip itself and not the destination. This is the story of a journey, a wandering through some strange, dark, and abruptly violent corners, and it isn't really important where Rey ends up, but how he gets there.

Aetherchrist is a bizarre work, but also bizarrely engaging. It's one of those books that I'm pretty sure I understood, even if I can't properly and sanely articulate all the ins and outs about it. What I do know for sure, though, is that it completely captivated me, held my interest, and made me feel completely invested in my brief journey alongside Rey and his briefcase of knives. I'm also pretty sure Kirk Jones just earned himself a new reader with this book, one who is curious what other oddities he's put to the page.



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Review: Hell Divers III: Deliverance by Nicholas Sansbury Smith

Hell Divers III: Deliverance (Hell Divers Series, Book 3)

By Nicholas Sansbury Smith






My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Picking up on the heels of Hell Divers II: Ghosts finale, Michael Everheart and his small crew of Hell Divers set out to find the missing Xavier "X" Rodriguez after being abandoned by the traitorous Captain Jordan.

Nicholas Sansbury Smith stretches his narrative wings a bit in Deliverance, giving readers insight into X's decade-long stint on Earth's hellscape through prolonged flashbacks, in between tackling the story's present-day timeline from the perspectives of Everheart and Jordan, and a few other Hell Divers along the way. Readers who were disappointed at the lack of X in the prior novel, particularly after Smith's nasty cliff-hanger ending back in Book 1, will certainly get their fill of Rodriguez this time around as Smith brings X back to the narrative's center.

While I was certainly happy to get more of X, now accompanied by a thawed-from-cryo husky named Miles, the real delight for me was seeing Smith's post-apocalyptic world building. While X travels the hellish landscape of an irradiated America to reach the ocean, Smith gives us a delightful tour of this new nuclear-adapted ecosystem. In prior novels, the Sirens were the clearly the biggest threat facing the remnants of mankind, but life outside the airship Hive is more expansive and far-reaching in Deliverance than the Hell Divers had imagined. As Ian Malcolm famously reminded us in Jurassic Park, "Life breaks free, it expands to new territories and crashes through barriers, painfully, maybe even dangerously... Life, uh, finds a way." Smith takes Malcolm's words to heart, presenting a number of thrilling encounters that reminds humans they may no longer be at the top of the food chain in this wildly mutated environment.

Not that life aboard the airship Hive is much better. Without mincing too many words, let me just say that Captain Jordan is a piece of crap. I hated this guy in Book 2, and Book 3 didn't do much to swing me around to his iron-fist mentality of rule as the top dog. Every chapter he showed up in only solidified his narcissism and I kept waiting for him to get his comeuppance. Life aboard the airships, though, does make for a fun bit of compare and contrast to life on the ground. No matter what dangers lurk in the ruins of America, Jordan and his cronies serve to remind us that humans are, typically, the biggest threat to everything around.

If you've enjoyed the previous two Hell Divers books, you'll feel right at home with Deliverance. Smith delivers plenty of action and suspense, and even a few dashes of socio-political intrigue along the way. Its final moments even kick the door wide open for a fourth installment, taking this series in a direction that good and truly excites me. I can't wait to see what comes next!

[Note: I received an advance copy of this title from the publisher via NetGalley.]



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MASS HYSTERIA Summer Sale - Only 99c in eBook!

Amazon 
iBooks  |  Nook  |  Kobo 
Google Play | Smashwords

Audiobook available at:
Audible  |  iTunes

Summer is right around the corner and now is the perfect time to start stocking up on your summer beach reads! I wrote Mass Hysteria as a pulpy, gory, splatterpunk horror summertime blast, the kind of big Hollywood-style spectacle that screams warm weather fun...and maybe makes a few readers scream along with it. If you're a fan of extreme When Animals Attack-style horror, like Piranha, The Birds, Jaws, or The Rats, this one should be right up your alley. Mass Hysteria is currently on sale for only 99c for a limited time, so get your copy quick!

If you're not an eBook fan, there is a paperback edition also available, as well an audiobook! If you're an Amazon customer, you can even bundle all three formats together for maximum savings. Buy the paperback and get the Kindle edition for free. Get the Kindle copy, and add Audible narration for cheap. You can enjoy Mass Hysteria all kinds of way!

The audiobook is even up for an award! Mass Hysteria is a finalist in this year's Audiobook Listeners Choice Awards, and if you like the book and Joe Hempel's reading, you can even vote for Mass Hysteria to win. Polls close May 31, so if you get a copy of my book and can check it out before the month is over, be sure to cast a vote, too.

About Mass HysteriaIT CAME FROM SPACE...

Something virulent. Something evil. Something new. And it is infecting the town of Falls Breath.

Carried to Earth in a freak meteor shower, an alien virus has infected the animals. Pets and wildlife have turned rabid, attacking without warning. Dogs and cats terrorize their owners, while deer and wolves from the neighboring woods hunt in packs, stalking and killing their human prey without mercy.

As the town comes under siege, Lauren searches for her boyfriend, while her policeman father fights to restore some semblance of order against a threat unlike anything he has seen before. The Natural Order has been upended completely, and nowhere is safe.

...AND IT IS SPREADING.

Soon, the city will find itself in the grips of mass hysteria.

To survive, humanity will have to fight tooth and nail.

This edition includes a bonus short story, Consumption!

What Readers Are Saying

"Brutal horror. Raw. Animalistic. I couldn't put it down!" - Armand Rosamilia, author of the Dying Days series

"Mass Hysteria is a hell of a brutal, end of the world free for all. A terrifying vision of a future gone mad with bloodlust, Mass Hysteria will haunt your nightmares." - Hunter Shea, author of Just Add Water and We Are Always Watching

"Fun, horrible fun, from start to finish." - Horror Novel Reviews

"It's fast paced, action-packed, and bloody. Really, almost everything a horror gore-hound could want. ... Undeniably talented, Michael Patrick Hicks shows evidence of a rather deliciously depraved mind..." - SciFi & Scary

"Mass Hysteria was a brutal horror novel, which reminded me of the horror being written in the late 70's and, (all of the), 80's. Books like James Herbert's The Rats or Guy N. Smith's The Night of the Crabs. There are a lot of similarities to those classics here-the fast paced action going from scene to scene-with many gory deaths and other sick events. In fact, I think Mass Hysteria beats out those books in its sheer horrific brutality." - Char's Horror Corner

"If you like your horror bloody and strange, you are in the right place. Mass Hysteria is a unique twist in a crowded field. ... For horror fans looking for something different, well worth a listen." - Audiobook Reviewer

"I'm telling you now, this book isn't for readers with weak stomachs. It is brutal in all the right ways." - Cedar Hollow Horror Reviews

"If you are an aficionado of author Richard Laymon, you undoubtedly will like this book. This is horror at its bloodiest, guttiest and most shocking." - Cheryl Stout, Amazon Top 500 Reviewer and Amazon Vine Voice

"Brutal and well-written. Throw in narration by Joe Hempel and you’ve got gold. ... I don’t think I’ll forget Mass Hysteria for some time." - Brian's Book Blog

Buy the ebook edition of Mass Hysteria for only 99 cents! (Also available in paperback and audiobook formats.)

Amazon 
iBooks  |  Nook  |  Kobo 
Google Play | Smashwords

Audiobook available at:
Audible  |  iTunes

Review: Bone Saw by Patrick Lacey

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Liam is a horror movie aficionado, particularly of those titles from Bone Saw Studios and director Clive Sherman. Liam is also a bit of a down-on-his-luck loser - a film student dropout pining over his ex-girlfriend, recently fired from his job as a video store clerk, and bullied by his pot-dealing best friend's girlfriend. His luck may be on the upswing though after meeting the pierced and dreadlocked beauty, Michelle, waiting tables at the local diner and learning that his Hollywood idol, Clive, is directing a new film in town. Yep, things are looking up...except...How does Clive get those special effects to look so real? And what's up with that giant, insane pigman creature roaming around Bass Falls killing and eating people?

If you follow Patrick Lacey on social media, you'll know immediately this dude is a horror fan. His affectation for the genre bleeds through Bone Saw, and this story is a pulpy work of 1980s-styled, B-grade, gorehound fun. The story of Pigfoot, in both his cinematic and present-day Bass Falls murdering machine incarnation, is entertaining and properly gory. Lacey sets the stage, as it were, right in Bone Saw's opening chapter, and keeps the pace smooth and steady the rest of the way through. He sprightly maneuvers his way through various points of view, letting us spend plenty of time with Liam, Clive, Michelle, and Briggs, a private eye working on tracking down Michelle while perpetually chugging down Robitussin, as well as plenty of Pigfoot kills. Lots and lots of Pigfoot kills.

Given Bone Saw's story of a horror movie turned real, there's a particular focus on gore. Lacey wracks up quite a bloody body count in this one, and the last half of the book generates some grand, large scale moments of mayhem fit for the big-screen. With all the bodies getting chomped on and ripped apart, the chaos descending upon Bass Falls certainly helps redefine the term tourist trap. The good news is, Amity Island should be seeing a resurgence in out of town visitors after all this is over...

Bone Saw is not high-brow horror, nor is it an overly serious work intent on studying the state of mankind through the reflective mirror of themes and social commentary. Nor need it; after all, aren't we all, to some degree or another, a Pigfoot of our making? What Bone Saw is, however, is a tremendous amount of gory, splattery fun, and Liam and Michelle, and their burgeoning romance amidst all the carnage, as well as Lacey's own infectious enthusiasm for horror as filtered through Liam, give the book an extra bit of charm. Lacey's latest arrives just in time for beach-reading season, perfectly timed for you chill out with, maybe in a small-town coastal tourist trap, with a cooler full of icy beers beside you.

[Note: I received an advanced copy of this title from the publisher, Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing.]



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Review: Obscura by Joe Hart

Obscura

By Joe Hart






My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Joe Hart takes us into the near-future in Obscura, to a time when the Earth is severely polluted and global warming is set to pay a disastrous toll. A deadly new virus, Losian, has emerged, cursing the afflicted with an Alzheimer's-like memory loss on the way to fatality. Although science hasn't had much luck curbing mankind's deadly carbon footprint, it has made some headway into developing a new, cutting-edge method of travel currently being tested in space. Inexplicably, though, the human test subjects are developing violent psychoses and memory loss - symptoms that bear remarkable similarities to Losian. After losing her research funding, Dr. Gillian Ryan is recruited by NASA to continue her work and develop a cure for those afflicted aboard the space station. Easy, right?

Hart does a tremendous job building up the story of Obscura, giving Gillian plenty of personal reasons to be involved in the search for Losian's cure, while also making her an important and striking character in her own right. Smart, tough, and resourceful, Gillian is a terrific heroine, but one who also has an important weak spot in her addiction to pills. On the science front, Hart's fresh mode of travel will be old-hat to plenty of sci-fi fans, but the technology is given a shiny new coat of paint here thanks to some refreshing plot elements and unintended consequences.

While Obscura is a thrilling read, Hart infuses plenty of creepiness throughout, injecting some welcome elements of horror that will keep readers guessing. There are a few memorable scenes, and characters, etched into my mind thanks to Hart's vivid descriptions and scenarios that packed a lovely bit of wow factor. The story itself is what truly grabbed me, though - murders aboard a space station, drug addiction, and whole lotta paranoia - all perfectly paced and flawlessly executed. I absolutely had to know what was happening, and what was going to happen next.

Obscura is the kind of read you need to clear your calendar for because this is one hell of a page-turner from start to finish. Fans of Blake Crouch’s Dark Matter and Pines should feel right at home with this cutting-edge thriller.

[Note: I received an advanced copy of this title from publisher Thomas & Mercer via NetGalley.]



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