Seeing Red: A Reflection

Looking at my last name and the last name of the author of Seeing Red, you’ll understand why this isn’t a review. My brother is author T. M. Doran. As such, this posting is not a proper review of this novel, it won’t receive a rating, and it won’t be […]

Review Dead of Winter

I read Dead Leaves by Kealan Patrick Burke and added Dead of Winter immediately to the list. Dead Leaves is a great novel to read at Halloween and during autumn. Dead of Winter, which targets Christmas and wintertime, is not quite at the level as its cousin collection. A sample […]

Review of Sweet Remembrance

Sweet Remembrance by Emily Anne Putzke is a hidden treasure and one of the best retellings or interpretations I’ve read of any fairytale. This is a tall claim, but I’ll stick by it. “The Little Match Girl” by Hans Christian Andersen is a short story meant to both challenge and […]

Review of Might of the Divided City

Might of the Divided City by Jeremy Gordon Grinnell accomplished a rare feat while I was reading it. I planned to review it, I planned to take notes on it, but suddenly, I was so wrapped up in the plot and characters, I was just reading it with the abandon […]

Review Winters’ Resonance

Jenifer Lynn’s Winters’ Resonance (A Series of Echoes Book 1) is a horror novel that scares us with the most frightening monster of all—teenagers. Seriously, it’s a chilling story of killer humanoids that appear as teens from out of the night to wreak destruction. In the prologue, a family on […]

Sheltered in Place

Full disclosure. I met professor and poet C.J. Giroux before either of us started as students our freshman year at our different universities. He and I became friends while working a college job. We rarely discussed writing, English, or the arts. Even in the years since, our friendship has been […]

Review of Final Chance

E. B. Roshan’s Final Chance: Shards of Sevia is a drama set in a fictional country (Sevia) currently in the middle of a major internal conflict. The ethnic Turs and the Sevia majority are violently clashing until Europe sends peacekeeping troops. With this tenuous situation in place, a young woman […]

Review of Havok World Tour

Havok’s new anthology promises to take us on a world tour of stories set around the Earth. For this Havok anthology, I rated each story based on three categories: story, mechanics, and theme. The story rating is how much it entertained, its creativity, the stakes/conflict. In essence, how moving was […]

Review Blood Secrets

Morgan L. Busse’s Blood Secrets is the second of the Skyworld duology. In SkyWorld, the land has been overridden with a green mist containing deadly spores that reanimate corpses. Called “The Turned,” these zombie-like creatures roam the countryside. But the mist hasn’t reached the higher altitudes, so many people live […]

Review Children of the Wild

Children of the Wild by debut author Krysta Tawlks is a historical fantasy about magic and creatures with a hint of steampunk. But what it’s really about is family, loss, guilt, and revelations. While the setting may adhere close to certain Steinbeck novels—a rare choice for a fantasy novel—the plot […]