Month: June 2016

This is a book written for fourteen-year-olds, but no early teenager should go anywhere near it. I mean, I know that hormones have their effect, but the idea that it is in any way normal for a group of people to spend their adult lives in a frenzy of lust and violence is rather unbelievable.…

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“Copperhead Road” meets “The Godfather.” Both these works deal with the idea that if you treat the po’folks like dirt but put them in the army and teach them to kill, you’re likely to have a problem when they come home. In both cases the heroes come from criminal families and return from war to…

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In Episode 2 of the “Hell Holes” serial, Angela Mendez and Jack Oswald continue their mad flight up the North Slope of Alaska, a horde of demonic creatures at their backs. As they trundle their increasingly beat-up 4 X 4 through a carefully researched and realistically portrayed landscape, they are subjected to a never-ending series of…

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Too Much Magic, Too Little Information There is a tendency among young writers to become overwhelmed by the power of their art and to overuse that power without regard to the feelings of their readers. As writers we must realize that we have the ultimate control. We know everything about the story. The readers know only…

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The Wizard’s Heir is, as the title suggests, the story of a young man (Tybolt) who discovers that his heritage is quite different from what he thought it was. As he learns more about his background he begins to question the wizard-hating tenets of the regime he has been enthusiastically supporting, and the story takes off…

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