book reviews by Marc D. Goldfinger

Dark Matter by Blake Crouch

Posted by Klaus

Dark Matter by Blake Crouch. Crown Publishers, an Imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. www.crownpublishing.com

“What might have been and what has been
point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened.”—T.S. Eliot from “Burnt Norton”

Jason Desson is sitting at the dinner table with the family he loves very much. His son is fifteen and his name is Charlie. His beautiful wife is named Daniela and she watches him with her dark Spanish eyes.

Jason loves his life and can’t imagine anything different. He teaches at Lakemont College, a class in physics, and he enjoys that too. He could have been so much more if he had gone into the private experimental sector but he made a choice and doesn’t regret it.

Well, maybe sometimes he does have a twinge of regret. His wife was on the fast track in the art world and she gave all that up to raise a family and become a teacher too. The paths we choose change everything about our lives.

Then there is Ryan Holder, Jason’s friend and former colleague, who just won the Pavia Prize for identifying the pre -frontal cortex as a consciousness generator. Jason is at the celebration, where Ryan gives him a hard time because he thinks that Jason could have won the prize if he hadn’t gone into teaching.

Jason, who feels quite lucky to be married to Daniela with a wonderful son, fills with anger and leaves the celebration. And that is when the change begins.

It’s one thing to be kidnapped for ransom. But it is quite another thing to be kidnapped and sent to another world where your life is totally different and you become the award winning physicist, but lose your wife and family. Suddenly you are rich and famous, but alone and miserable, and not to mention scared to death about what just seemed to happen to your life.

It also raises the question of who has taken your place in the world you came from and how did that happen?

Advantage—you have all the tools to get back to your real life, but you lack the skill to use the tools. There is a Black Box, which gives you options of doors you can go through to find your correct life. But you don’t know the rules for choosing the correct door, and there are myriad doors to choose from. How do you find the world you want to get back to and who did this to you? Was it the man who took your place in the world you were taken out of?

That man is you, in your old world, yet he is not you. He is a pretender who is now sleeping with your wife. You are now him, in another reality, yet you really are not him. In the world you are now in you are the owner of Velocity Laboratories and you are rich and powerful, yet you can’t seem to get back home to your wife and depose the usurper.

Who is the real Jason Desson? How many Jason Desson’s are there? When Jason Desson goes into the Black Box that he created at Velocity Laboratories which allows him to visit myriad alternate realities, how will he discover the world he wants to re-enter? And he has a limit on the number of tries he can make to go home.

Whose place are you taking and who took your place? How do you use the Black Box? How do you choose the reality that will take you home? These are the questions facing Jason Desson in Dark Matter by Blake Crouch.

This book is dynamic and unbelievable yet, could it happen? It grabs your attention from the very beginning and takes you along on Jason’s travels and discoveries. A futuristic detective story/science fiction mix, Dark Matter is an exciting adventure about an unusual situation. It will definitely keep you interested and entertained, from first page to last.

I saw it at The Harvard Bookstore so go on in and grab it. But look out which door you leave the store by. Anything can happen.

Dead Man’s Blues by Ray Celestin

Posted by Klaus

Published by Mantle, an imprint of PanMacmillan, 20 Wharf Road, London NI 9RR www.panmacmillan.com

Dead Man’s Blues is a fantastic book that takes the reader back to the wild Chicago of 1928 where the booze and drugs flowed freely. The city is controlled by Alphonse Capone, a man in the grips of tertiary syphilis. The disease is in its third, incurable, stage.

Capone had syphilis for over fifteen years, before he went to an out of town doctor under a pseudonym, and got the bad news. It shook him to his core.

Capone was so upset by the news that he had his bodyguards drop him off at a sauna to relax his nerves. They waited outside while he reminisced the words of the doctor “If it develops into neurosyphilis, the spirochete, like a worm, will enter the brain and attack the frontal lobes—your personality may become exaggerated”. He sat in the sauna brooding until his mood changed when he rationalized that now he could do anything he felt like doing and blame his behavior on his illness.

With this in mind, Al Capone goes violent in the sauna before he leaves, riding off with his bodyguards afterward.

All the greats of jazz make their appearance in this thrilling crime drama—Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Henry Hines, etc. Chicago is the Big City and corruption is its first name.

Pinkerton Detectives Michael Talbot and Ida Davis play a major role in this book, hunting down a serial killer who likes to take out the eyes of his victims and leave them staring into space next to the corpse.

This is Ray Celestin’s 2nd book. His first book, The Axeman’s Jazz, took place in New Orleans in 1919, and a few of the same characters appear, more developed, in Dead Man’s Blues. Two of the main carry over players are detective Michael Talbot, married to a Black woman, which was a big deal back in that era, and Ida Davis, Michael’s Pinkerton’s partner, who is a light skinned Black woman who can pass for white, which she uses to her advantage.

Michael and Ida are offered $50,000, big money in those days, by a society belle, to find her daughter Gwendolyn. But because there is a conflict of interest here, they have to decide whether to take the job and leave the Pinkertons or decline and stay on the payroll.

The Axeman’s Jazz, Ray’s debut novel won the CWA John Creasey New Blood Dagger Award and was shortlisted for the Theakston’s Crime Novel of the Year 2014. Actually, as good as his first book was, Celestin’s 2nd book, Dead Man’s Blues, caps it and is much more cohesive. It appears that The Axeman’s Jazz was the introduction to what is going to be a four book series dealing with the era of Prohibition.

You might not hear much about Ray Celestin here in the United States but his books are both best sellers in Europe. It’s ironic that they deal with our history, the unwritten history of the mobs, the drugs, the brothels, and the free flowing liquor of the time. The story narrates one of the most corrupt periods of the United States.

Another main player in the story is Dante Sanfelippo, a gangster from Chicago, who made it big in New York City. But because of a tragedy unwittingly engineered by men he knew, Dante was responsible for the death of his wife Olivia and a bunch of New York mobsters. It so happened that champagne was laced with poison by guys who didn’t know what they were doing, but Dante was responsible for the distribution of the brew.

The poison brew also struck Chicago. But because of the quick action of a few bodyguards, the politicos and gangsters who drank the poison were rescued by prompt medical help. Al Capone, ironically, calls Dante back to Chicago to find the people at fault for the tragedy in New York and the near tragedy in Chicago.

Ever since the poison brew struck and killed Dante’s wife, he turned to heroin to ease the pain of his conscience. This puts him even more at risk to raise the ire of Alphonse Capone, who hates people who use and/or deal heroin, because he believes it makes them unreliable.

At one point, Dante scores a small block of heroin from his favorite shoeshine man, and goes to the beach to shoot up. While he’s shooting up, a stray dog comes over to him and watches. Afterwards the dog cuddles up to him so he takes it home. One of his friends names the dog Virgil, from Dante’s Inferno, and the name sticks.

Much of what I have related to you is just background information. I don’t want to reveal the main plots of the story because this is a book you should read and enjoy firsthand—after all, it’s a piece of American history that they don’t teach in school. Ray Celestin will be regarded as one of the great fiction writers in the near future. Currently, he lives in London, but you can buy his book, Dead Man’s Blues, at the Harvard Bookstore in Harvard Square.

Underground Airlines by Ben H. Winters

Posted by Klaus

Underground Airlines by Ben H. Winters. Mulholland Books/Little Brown & Company, Hachette Book Group; Goldsboro Books, UK Ltd. Edition S & N.

“No future amendment of the Constitution shall affect the five preceding articles, . . . and no amendment shall be made to the Constitution which shall authorize or give to Congress any power to abolish or interfere with slavery in any of the States by whose laws it is, or may be allowed or permitted.”—–The Senator John C. Crittenden Compromise, May 9, 1861.”

Imagine if President Lincoln was shot before the Civil War took place and then, because of that, and the greed of humankind, the Civil War never happened. If you were Black and born into a slave state—there would be no way you could ever be a free man.

There were four states that embraced slavery and even if you ran, there were hunters, most often Black themselves, who work to break into the Underground Airlines, and bring you back. There was no safe place for a slave to hide—unless they made it into Canada. And even there . . .

Ben H. Winters’ new book alters history and tells the story of a Black Man who was a slave, and his price for freedom was to become a hunter of other slaves and in his thankless quest, Jim Dirkson, free since he was 14 uncovers the horrible truth of the Underground Airlines.

With a GPS Tracker buried in the back of his neck, and a merciless handler that he contacts by cell phone, there is no escape. This is not the United States we know, yet, it can be horribly close. It’s not unknown for Black people to be suddenly grabbed and sold into slavery—their entire previous life erased by the press of a button on a computer.

The man we know as Jim Dirkson is closing in on a “runaway” slave who is waiting for his flight. Yet neither of the men have any idea of the situation they are really in.

The horrors of the jobs a slave must do include long and monotonous days. Our runaway would, for twelve hours a day, pluck the loose threads from the collars of shirts as they continuously rode up an assembly line. They are the type of jobs no one in their right mind could do for long.

I can remember when I had a factory job where I would watch a piece of metal the size of a paper clip move along an assembly line through a magnifying glass. The pin would move; I would press a lever and make a notch on it; the pin would move; I would press a lever and make a notch on the other side. A new pin would move into place. Work like this can make a person mad, in the sense of a falling apart of the mind.

These were slave jobs. Imagine, in the modern world, there being 4 states where it was legal to own a thinking, feeling man or woman just because his skin color is darker than yours.

“Under the Fugitive Persons Law, those who escape from service are to be captured and returned, anywhere they are found in the United States, slave state or free.” This is why Canada is the only answer, or any other country that doesn’t condone slavery.

Back in history, the escape route was called the “underground railroad”; there were no aircraft. Times have changed. We have aircraft, and GPS trackers, yet slavery still exists.

In Underground Airlines, Ben H. Winters has written his best book yet. It is certainly his most frightening tale. I saw copies of this book in the Harvard Book Store, one of my favorites, in Cambridge. If they don’t have it, they will order it and it will come in quickly.

I can’t tell the story like Ben H. Winters narrates the Underground Airlines, so I won’t. I hate spoilers in book reviews and try to avoid them as much as possible. His last three books, The Last Policeman trilogy won the 2012 Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. The second book of the trilogy, Countdown City, was an NPR Best Book of 2013 and the winner of the Philip K. Dick Award for Distinguished Science Fiction.

Ben H. Winters is truly coming into his own. Right now Goldsboro Books in London has a Limited Edition and the last time I checked they had some left. I’m sure these Signed and Numbered books will be collector’s editions in the near future.

Tales of Repairman Jack by F. Paul Wilson

Posted by Klaus

Tales of Repairman Jack by F. Paul Wilson: A Review by Marc D. Goldfinger / www.repairmanjack.com F. Paul Wilson is the creator of Repairman Jack published by Tor Books, New York, NY 10010 and Isher Books, distributed by the Gauntlet Press, among others.

Repairman Jack is one of the most exciting characters ever to come out of the mind of F. Paul Wilson, who in his spare time, when he is not writing, is a practicing physician in Wall, New Jersey. It would take a Jersey Boy to create someone as interesting and unique as Repairman Jack.

Some of the writers, beside myself, who are fans of Repairman Jack are Lee Childs, Stephen King, Charlaine Harris, Dean Koontz, Joe R. Lansdale, and Andrew Vacchss. That’s just a handful; there are more. Once I read my first Repairman Jack book, Harbingers, I was hooked.

I don’t recommend beginning there because that’s kind of the middle of a long story. Actually, I think wrong; I began with Infernal, which introduced me to Jack’s brother Tom, who is a practicing judge in Philadelphia.

It might appear that Jack is the black sheep in the family, but families have many secrets and sometimes our brothers and sisters might be in competition for that title. We don’t always know them as well as we think we do. In the book Infernal, Jack’s brother Tom cons Jack into going on a treasure hunt looking for a wreck off the coast of Bermuda.

As is often the case with Jack’s adventures, things go astray. I’m not going to ruin the book for you by giving you the storyline. I will tell you that Jack hangs out in a bar called The Spot, which is run by Julio, who becomes a close friend, and the search for treasure turns into a dark tale of mystery and power.

Repairman Jack doesn’t exist. Well, he is real, but a tragic event in his life causes him to have reason to stay hidden from society. He has no Social Security card, pays no taxes and because of his desire to protect the people he loves, Jack becomes a ghost in the machine of civilization. He is a repairman because he implements solutions to problems that can’t be fixed by legitimate means. They are problems that can only be solved by someone who can’t be traced or identified.

You will love Repairman Jack. What’s nice about that is the fact that there are over 16 books of his adventures, and they all tell tales that are continuous and yet, they also stand alone. You’ll know when you are nearing the end of the Repairman Jack story because his books tend to end with cliffhangers.

Perhaps you would enjoy starting with the book named Dark City, which is one of the early histories of Jack. It’s not the earliest history of Jack; the beginning of his story is told in a series of three books written for Young Adults.

We all have to begin somewhere, don’t we? The first Young Adult book is called Jack: Secret Histories and it begins with Jack growing up in the pine barrens of New Jersey, when he is in high school. I suggest you start reading about Jack here. Isn’t everyone really a young adult, a child who happened to get wrinkled and grey?

I remember flying up the stairs when I was young. Now I trudge up the stairway to the wonderful apartment where I live. However, I fly through the books I read and then I write about them. I even write about myself from time to time. I’ve heard many people say, “my life is so interesting I could write a book about it,” but they never do.

I found out through holding writing workshops that many people enjoy talking about writing but when it comes to picking up the pen and putting it to the empty page, that is another story.

F. Paul Wilson dares to put the pen to the page, and he has created a character whose adventures tear through a minimum of at least 16 books. Repairman Jack is not the only character Dr. Wilson created—he wrote a story called SIMS, divided into five novellas that deal with genetic engineering.

In the third book of the young adult series a tragic event takes place that changes Jack’s life forever. No, I won’t tell you what it is—but every boy, from a good home, loves his mother. Once you finish Secret Histories, Secret Circles, and Secret Vengeance, you are ready to enter the next trilogy, which takes Repairman Jack to the Dark City.

In the Dark City you will meet Abe, who is a mensch who runs the Isher Sports Shop. Abe becomes one of Jack’s closest friends. Does anyone reading this remember the Weapon Shop of Isher? Google it, my friend, and be enlightened. The writer A. E. Van Vogt would want you to do this.

Then there is Jacks adversary, Rasalom, who is first introduced in F. Paul Wilson’s book called The Keep. This story takes place during the hell of Nazi Germany, in the way back of 1941. The Keep is in the Dinu Pass, in Romania and it was created to contain—well, needless to say, one of the most frightening enemies of Repairman Jack series arises from The Keep. I cannot say more.

People clamor for F. Paul Wilson to write more Repairman Jack books, however, it appears that he may be done. Yet, one can always hope. Some might say—isn’t 16 + books enough? I say thee, nay, there can never be enough Repairman Jack. Now all we need is some movies. Really.

The Wolf Road by Beth Lewis

Posted by Klaus

The Wolf Road by Beth Lewis: A Book Review\ By Marc D. Goldfinger. Goldsboro Books, 23-25 Cecil St., London, WC2N 4E2, United Kingdom, S & N Limited Edition/and Crown Publishing Group, A Division of Penguin Random House

“Think on why I ain’t killing you.”—-Kreagar

Elka doesn’t remember her parents. She lives in the wilderness, after a war that destroyed civilization, with a man named Trapper. Trapper teaches her to survive in the wilds but hates the small towns around them; he has a terrible secret that he doesn’t want Elka to find out about.

For a brief time before living with Trapper, Elka lived with an old woman she called NaNa, but Elka got separated from her during a “thunderhead”, a giant storm that occurs sporadically since the wars, that the people refer to as “the Damn Stupid”, wrecked the infrastructure of civilization. From the description of the world, it sounded as if it was a nuclear war.

Elka was about 7 years old and wandering about in the woods when Trapper found her. He told her that he would take care of her until they found her NaNa. She was a little frightened of him because he had what looked like blue mud pictures on his face that didn’t come off.

One day Trapper came back and told Elka that her NaNa was crushed by a tree during the last “thunderhead”, but he said he would take care of her. Trapper taught Elka to hunt, build snares, skin rabbits, squirrels and deer, and generally how to survive in their world.

Trapper had mean parts to his personality, and one time Elka cut herself and spilled her blood over a snare. Trapper made her sleep outside by the snare for three days because he no animal would come near a snare that smelled of human blood.

The description of Elka’s life with Trapper takes place in the first 50 pages. At the end of her apprenticeship, Elka is about 17 years old and a really strong woman. This is where the story really begins.

So I haven’t told you a lot of the story, just some clues as to how the book begins. It’s really an exciting story where the tension builds as Elka goes to town for the first time and sees a Wanted Poster with the picture of the man she lives with. Elka knows him as Trapper but the Wanted Poster calls him Kreagar Hallet and says he is wanted for murder.

Elka is approached by the sheriff of Dalston, the nearest small town to where she lives. The sheriff, Jennifer Lyon, claims that the man Elka knows as her father is the killer of eight women and one child.

Elka is dumbstruck by this information. At this point she feels she needs to get out on her own and think things through, never realizing that the man she calls Trapper and thinks of as her Daddy, will track her, no matter where she travels.

The book is told in 1st person narrative. At first, Elka’s way of telling the story took a little getting used to, but once I got used to her thought pattern, the book was difficult to put down. This is Beth Lewis’s first novel and it is a wonderful beginning.

When a civilization breaks down, a feudal society fills the space. Women, on their own, need to know how to fend for themselves or men quickly take them into servitude. In today’s world, we call them pimps.

Elka meets friends along the road, and I use the term friends loosely. We cannot always trust someone we think of as a friend. Religion has its place in the world, and in a world where life is savage, so are so-called men of god. Blood is more than symbolic in one church that Elka stumbles into.

Luckily, Elka is quite strong and her naivety quickly dissipates which makes it possible for her to survive. Elka is hunted, by more people than her father, and her travels are full of interesting situations.

The Wolf Road gets its title from the nature of the path on which Elka finds herself. The world is strange and, at one point in the story, she camps at a lake that radiates warmth. She is lucky to get away with her body intact.

One of Elka’s friends camps there with her father and their story does not end happily. However, if that event didn’t take place, Elka would not have met Penelope, a woman of the same age who teaches Elka some useful things—yet there is something about her that makes Elka wonder if she can be trusted.

I purchased the book from Goldsboro Books, a specialty book-seller in Europe. It is a Signed & Numbered edition for a fair price. There were only 750 copies printed. I highly recommend that bookseller which can be found on the Internet. There were still some copies left the last time I checked.

Here, in the United States, the book will be released on July 5th, and by the time you read this, that date will have come and gone. I always recommend the Harvard Book Store, one of the few independent booksellers left. If they don’t have it in stock, they will be happy to order it for you.

The Wolf Road is a great summer read and I’m looking forward to Beth Lewis’s next book. It’s a great, if a bit dark, adventure.

Boy’s Life by Robert R. McCammon

Posted by Klaus

Boy’s Life by Robert R. McCammon, A Pocket Star Book published by Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc., New York, NY 10020 and Subterranean Press, PO Box 190106, Burton MI 48519 www.subterraneanpress.com

Zephyr, Alabama is a small town where Cory Mackenson grew up in the early 60’s. His father, Tom, was a milkman and sometimes Cory would ride with his dad early in the morning and help drop off the full bottles of milk and cream and pick up the empties to bring back to the dairy where the bottles would be washed and sterilized and readied to be filled again.

I remember those days myself because, at my house in North Arlington, New Jersey, we had an insulated box where the bottles would go when we finished the milk and then, in the morning, I would go out and get the fresh bottles of milk, sweating in the early morn, and bring them in the house. Those were the days before the big box supermarkets opened up, putting all the mom and pop grocery stores out of business.

The small dairies went down too because everyone bought their milk in those big box supermarkets with the angry lights where the people behind the cash registers would ring up our orders and take our money but they wouldn’t know our names. The world changed and a boy’s life isn’t the same now as it was when I was young.

Cory was out on an early morning run with his dad on a curve near Saxon’s Lake, the lake that was rumored to have no bottom, and as they went round the curve a brown car rolled across the road into the lake. The lights were off but they could see someone behind the wheel.

Cory’s dad, Tom, jumped out of the milk truck, dove into the Saxon’s Lake to save the guy and when he got to the car he looked in and the man’s face was all battered and bruised and he was handcuffed to the steering wheel. There was nothing he could do but he knew that vision would haunt him the rest of his life.

However, there were answers to be found and I dare not spoil the world you will enter when you travel to Zephyr. It becomes your town and your life. When Cory sees the look on his dad’s face as he comes out of the water, he knows that a major, life-changing event has taken place.

This book is one of the most wonderful stories I have ever read. Robert R. McCammon has that special touch with words—he brought me back in time and I felt that I was living this story. All the different issues that I remember from my childhood such as segregation, bullying, long exciting bicycle rides, events that took place in my place of worship and so much more were magically brought back to me as I read the adventures of Cory Mackenson in the small town where he grew up.

The mixture of events that take place touched me personally; the loss of a young friend; the mom and pop grocery store my father owned in Newark, New Jersey, where all the customers were Black (we used the word Negro back then) and the different lifestyles I encountered when I worked in my dad’s store.

In Boy’s Life, when school ended for the summer the warm lazy adventurous days ahead stretched infinitely into the future. Robert R. McCammon, the writer, actually made me feel like I was Cory and was re-living my childhood through his words. McCammon has written many books that insert the reader into his world. He’s truly a great writer.

Is Boy’s Life McCammon’s best book? Some say so because it is a book that many of us who are still alive can repeat our own young days and the summers that would never end.

There is so much I want to say about this wonderful book but I don’t want to spoil the story for you and reveal the life of the town of Zephyr, on one side of the river, and the magical Blacktown, on the other side of the river that cuts through the towns and divides them into two.

What’s in the river that scares the folks so much? The Lady, the matriarch of Blacktown is more than a century old and no one dares cross her unless they want to be haunted. Yet The Lady is also a healer and peacekeeper and plays a large part of the life of Cory Mackenson.

And no good mystery river could be complete without its resident water monster, which is fed raw meat by the folks of Blacktown every year on Good Friday.

This book was written over 20 years ago but it is still available in stores and various websites for a reasonable amount of money—both in hard cover and pocket book editions. I bought mine in the used book department of Harvard Book Store for only $3.50.

There are not many adventures that cost so little and mean so much. I highly recommend this book. If you read it you’ll be glad you did and you will certainly seek out other books by Robert J. McCammon. Such as McCammon’s Matthew Corbett series.

McCammon’s Matthew Corbett series is into it’s 6th book now and he hasn’t lost his touch even though he’s now close to my age. I have all six of those books and I’m waiting for the last two to bring closure to the riveting adventures of Matthew Corbett in the 17th century.

This is not a Matthew Corbett review, so I shall end by speaking of the magic of Boy’s Life by Robert R. McCammon and the fact that, of all the multiple tales within this book, Mr. McCammon is able to tie the knots of each one and I was left more than satisfied. I believe you will be overjoyed that you chose to read Boy’s Life.

Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Neuval

Posted by Klaus

Sleeping Giants; by Sylvain Neuval; Published by Penguin Random House LLC, New York, N.Y. in 2016; A Series:The Themis Files; Book 1. www.randomhousebooks.com

Rose Franklin is riding her bicycle in her hometown in Deadwood, South Dakota when, as far as Rose is concerned, the world ends. She wakes up at the bottom of a square hole; its walls are glowing and the firemen who came to save her are staring down into the hole.

What they see is a little girl at the bottom of a hole lying in a giant hand. The story begins 17 years later. The little girl is grown up now and she is known as Dr. Rose Franklin, an extremely bright physicist who is being interviewed for an unusual job by a powerful employer.

Before Sylvain Neuval started this book he built a giant alien robot in a tale specifically designed for his son. So the story began with two children and one very motivated adult with an extremely varied background. Much like the characters in Sleeping Giants.

The book was originally rejected several times, but Sylvain Neuval persevered. When he sent his manuscript to Kirkus for a review he received an ecstatic review. All of a sudden, he had an agent and Sony was optioning book one of The Themis Files for a movie.

This young novelist was born in Quebec, dropped out of high school and has worked an amazing number of jobs. One of them was in an ice cream shop in California, which endeared him to my heart because that was one of my many jobs. Sylvain sold furniture, went back to school and taught linguistics in India and has worked as a software engineer; is also a certified translator and received his PHD in Linguistics from the University of Chicago.

Well, that’s enough about him. I started reading Sleeping Giants and couldn’t put it down. I finished it in less than a day and a half and just sat there stunned by the ending—about which you couldn’t pay me to give you a clue. Let it be said that there are two more books coming; the next book will be called Waking Gods and is due out in 2017.

Sleeping Giants is set up as a series of interviews with the main characters by CIA type individuals who are privy to information that most people are not. One individual is CW3 Kara Resnick, United States Army, who is a top-notch helicopter pilot.

At the Coleman Army Airfield in Mannheim, Germany, an unknown interviewer talks to Kara about an incident that occurred when she and her co-pilot CW Mitchell were drifting over Syria to try and investigate suspected nuclear development sites. All of a sudden, they noticed light below them, which was unusual in itself because it was farmland.

Then all engines went full stop and for a moment all was peaceful and then they fell into what was once a field. What appears to have brought them down was another piece of the body that the original hand was a part. Secrecy was wrapped as tight as it could be and the piece was shipped back to an unknown giant chamber where the hand was resting.

I found myself reading interview after interview. Things developed and events took place that surprised me and pulled my interest into the story in such a way that I became part of the enterprise. I’m not going to reveal those events because I don’t want to throw spoilers at you.

This book is one of the most dynamic adventures I have ever read. Sylvain Neuvel is terrific and I can’t wait until Waking Gods is released. I always worry when I begin an exciting trilogy at my tender age of 70 because I want to be there when the next book comes out. At this time Sylvain Neuvel plans to complete The Themis Files in three books.

He has a beautiful website that goes with the book and I encourage anyone who has interest in the book to peruse it. It is www.themisfiles.com/ and you will enter the strange world of Sylvain Neuval.

There are people who compare this book to World War Z and The Martian. The only thing this book has in common with World War Z is the interview style. It’s so much better than World War Z—I couldn’t even finish that book. I loved The Martian, to tell the truth, but Sleeping Giants has a magic that goes beyond Mars. It really does. They have the book at Harvard Square Books, and you can get it on Amazon too but if you buy it on Amazon, go to Amazon UK and see if they still have it in stock—the European dust jacket is killer.

A Man Lies Dreaming by Lavie Tidhar

Posted by Klaus

A Man Lies Dreaming by Lavie Tidhar; published by Melville House Publishing, 46 John Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201 & 8 Blackwood Mews, Islington, London N4 2BT—mphbooks.com face.com/mhpbooks @melvillehouse—

A Man Lies Dreaming is an amazing alternate history book written by Lavie Tidhar, the author of The Violent Century and Osama. He is a past winner of the British Fantasy Award for Best Novel and the World Fantasy Award for Best novel. Lavie Tidhar grew up in a Kibbutz in Israel and in South Africa and currently lives in London.

In A Man Lies Dreaming, the man Wolf is a down and out private eye who was once the most powerful man in Germany. He was known for his dynamic speaking ability, whipping crowds into a frenzy while surrounded by his infamous Black Shirts.

His life has changed. Wolf works out of a shabby office in 1939 and still hates the Jews. It irks him that sometimes he has to work for them and wishes they had all remained in Germany, a country where most of the Jewish people are imprisoned and exterminated in concentration camps.

The story also involves a man named Shomer, a Jewish man who is in one of the German camps. He tells his story of horror where 9 to 12 people sleep on wooden pallets the guards call bunks, and line up at 4 a.m. every morning to wait two hours for the prisoner count. Then they are allowed to go to the latrine where another prisoner times them while they are relieving themselves.

The horror of the camps is illustrated in Shomer’s diary. Ironically Wolf keeps a diary too. In the beginning Wolf is hired by Isabella Rubenstein to find her missing sister by the name of Judith. Her father had arranged to have Judith smuggled out of Germany but something went wrong.

Back in those days it was not surprising for plans to fall apart. At first Wolf says that he does not work for Jews. But Isabella reminds him that now he has no choice in the matter, while she puts an envelope of money on his desk. Wolf takes the money and consummates the deal.

Wolf works out of an office in a desolate neighborhood filled with low-life crime. When he goes out the door of his building, whores solicit him constantly. He knows many of them are Jewish; he sees blue numbers on their arms.

Wolf constantly finds himself working for the very people he hated. Were it not for the Fall in Germany, he would still be in power. But now Germany is controlled by the communists, many of whom are Jewish. The world has changed for Wolf and his henchmen.

A Man Lies Dreaming is a book of a world inscribed by irony. While Wolf is violated by the people he hates, Shomer dreams of freedom in the camp.

In the middle of the night, Shomer wakes to relieve himself in the bucket, and as he does a little of the liquid seeps over the edge. Shomer knows it is his bad luck to have to dump the bucket; the man who fills it to the brim is the man who must empty it. He lifts the heavy bucket and takes it out of the dorm, the liquid splashing on his dirty bare feet. He dumps it and then brings it back in and crawls onto the bunk filled with other sleeping men. It takes a while before he sleeps; it will be time for roll call any minute.

Wolf, after being accused falsely of the murder of a whore, is released by one his old comrades who wishes to employ him. They remember the days when people hid when the name of the Wolf was mentioned. They called him “the Drummer” because of the way he pounded the podium as he spoke, his voice rising, spittle flying from his mouth, as he whipped the crowd to a frenzy.

Those days are past him now. He is nobody.

Lavie Tidhar creates an amazing world that could have been, but wasn’t. There are things taking place in this story that create a reality that is true even today. While it is a past that never took place, at the same time, it did take place in another form. Tidhar is a writer that commands the page and when you read his book, his world becomes yours.

I wish I could say more but I don’t want to spoil the story for you. This book is not for the faint of heart. Lavie Tidhar spins a tale of magic and shows the human condition for what it is. In a book that seems impossible, the dark fantasy becomes real.

Lavie Tidhar is a writer from Israel who won the World Fantasy Award in 2012 for his imaginative book called Osama, which is still available. His history bending writing is totally unique.

Rachel Rising by Terry Moore

Posted by Klaus

Rachel Rising by Terry Moore; Published by Abstract Studio, Box 271487, Houston, TX,77277

Imagine, if you can, digging yourself out of a grave in the ground, and not having any memory of how you wound up there or of who you really are.

Rachel Rising is an amazing tale, but I really did not realize it at first.  Let me clarify. We are talking about a graphic novel, drawn and written by Terry Moore.

You see, comics are so short and they come out every two months, so they can be difficult to follow.  Rachel Rising will be concluded with the 42nd issue, so there is a great deal of story to follow. It is complex, and I found myself, once I started buying trades 1—5, of which there will be 7 when the tale is complete, reading the story and flipping back through the pages because an event was occurring that triggered remembrances of something that happened much earlier. There are 6 individual comics in a trade.

I’m ashamed to admit that I started buying the single comics in the beginning and discontinued reading them at around issue 11.  However, if I had been able to conveniently flip back to earlier comics and reread certain sections, I would never have discontinued the series.

Rachel Rising is a wonderfully complex, detailed adventure that must be read in large chunks at a time.  I’m a writer and I remembered how wonderful were Strangers In Paradise and Echo, also by Terry Moore, so I decided to give Rachel Rising another chance.  When I bought and read the 5 trade paperbacks altogether, with total enjoyment, I was amazed. Terry Moore has outdone himself. The story is carefully plotted and drawn and Terry didn’t miss a trick.

The story takes place in a town called Manson, which has a history of conspiring against women of nature. Many were tortured and hung. But it is now present day, and the worm has turned, so to speak.

Rachel Rising is populated by a group of unique characters. There are the women who were hung and have come back, Rachel being one of them. Her friends are also unique.

Aunt Johnny is an undertaker and happily committed, in a lesbian relationship.

Then there is Doctor Siemen, who keeps company with his wife and claims she is agoraphobic. Actually, she doesn’t go out because she is quite dead.

The women of the past and present, and a killer little girl named Zoe, attempt to set things right in Manson. Justice must be done. This story has ghosts, dire wolves, a dog that becomes possessed with the spirit of Aunt Johnny, and an active mortuary. There is also a priest who, well, you’ll see.

Rachel Rises and hits the road, picked up by a Good Samaritan who is quite concerned about her state of being. She looks awful good for someone who spent 3 days in a shallow grave.

The first thing she does is go home and take a shower and then, at the sink she coughs up pieces of earth and notices a bruise around the front of her neck, like a rope necklace.

Then, shortly after a quick stop at the local car repair shop, Rachel drops in on at Aunt Johnny at the mortuary. At first Johnny doesn’t recognize Rachel.

Then Rachel gets Aunt Johnny to take a break and go with her to the gravesite. Aunt Johnny jumps into the grave and calls out Rachel’s name and Rachel says, “I’m here,” and finally Aunt Johnny recognizes her, in some sense of the word.

Then Rachel goes to a bar looking for her friend Jet, and has an encounter of the fourth kind with a woman who is going to be married soon, or so she thinks.

Rachel lays hands on her and sees her future and it is dark indeed. Rachel gives her and her husband to be some advice that makes the worms turn. All of this takes place within the first chapter of book one with much more than half of the book to go.

As I said, there will be 7 books in all, or 42 comics, if you choose to buy them that way. Comic #1 sells for about $100 now because of the popularity of the story, and the rumor that the story has been optioned for a television show.

But, by all means, read the comic books first. By the time you read this, all the later issue comics will be out and the latter ones you can pick up for a normal price. However, I recommend buying the trade paper backs which contain approximately 6 comics in each trade.

If you really like this story, and I think you will, there will be a special hardcover Black Edition that will be limited to 750 signed and numbered copies. It is due to come out in July, and if you pre-order, you will get a sketch with the book signature. I have Terry Moore’s hardcover book of the story called Echo which now sells on Ebay for $199. It originally cost $75. I’m not going to go into the story of Echo, but trade paperbacks are available also from Abstract Studios, on the Internet or your local comic shop. Echo is extremely well done.

Rachel has risen and she is not the only one come back to avenge the innocent women who were killed by the gentle folk of Manson. A great yarn which is illustrated and penned by Terry Moore. Terry’s a nice guy too. It is amazing what must be going on in his head. I wouldn’t want to go there by myself.