Book Review: The Collapse

What else could the dead rising be other than a sick joke? Karen Gallagher is a mother, a wife, and a scientist, and her past is catching up to her. As the world falls victim to a viral pandemic, Karen struggles to keep her daughter safe, forced to turn to the people who burned her all while harboring an awful secret. Modern science is meant to progress humanity, and scientists dare to cross boundaries seemingly impassable, but when Anne White's unethical and immoral experiment to cure the incurable goes awry and is shut down, Clinical Pathologist Frank Eastman secretly takes the project into his own hands, accidentally releasing a bioengineered chimera virus that not only spreads like wildfire and kills its victims, it reanimates them, turning them into voracious flesh-eating husks of their former selves. Karen Gallagher only wants to do right by her family, and when horrible news and videos air of crazed people attacking others, her husband convinces her they have nothing to worry about, but what else is she supposed to think when a man who was shot multiple times gets up, unfazed by his wounds, to attack the officers who gunned him down? Karen knows all too well there's more to this story, and her only goal now is to keep her seven-year-old daughter safe. Told from dual perspectives, The Collapse follows the how of a zombie outbreak, taking you on a heart-wrenching journey of familial love.

Book Review: Blue Fire

Julianna has this glow about her, an iridescence in her blue eyes that shimmers, as if the ocean caught fire. Blue fire. Elijah cannot look away and finds himself drawn to her with an uncontrollable, and unreciprocated longing. He tries to forget her, but as if the universe is playing a cruel trick on him, Elijah keeps running into the love of his life. The only problem is, she belongs to someone else. As their paths become more and more intertwined, Elijah must fight to control his obsession, walking a fine line between stalker and friend. Fantasies morph into nightmares when Elijah realizes that the only thing more painful than simultaneously burning and drowning in blue fire is to extinguish the flame.

Book Review: Azygos

With two distinct paths, "Azygos" follows Marlowe's and Sloan's interweaving stories. Sloan and his family have been tracking his mother's killer for as long as he can remember. As time passes with no answers or closure, the resentment and hatred in his family grows to a breaking point. Marlowe and her family must return home to Portland after she recklessly commits a grave mistake while hunting. Her guilt and their judgment only intensify, but upon a chance meeting between the two, things begin to change. Finding comfort and warmth within each other, they forge a connection. But as people are murdered and secrets are told, their bond agonizingly twists towards its final challenge. With their lives colliding, the solace they find within each other may only be a disguise for their darkest nightmares.

Book Review: Blackmailer’s Delight

Every new romance has its ups and downs...
Its bumps in the road...
Its blackmail notes...

A misunderstanding ties the fates of three men together in this heartfelt, sensual, and uproarious romantic puzzle. Blackmailer's Delight is a tale of lives tossed into the air, then reassembled in some rather unexpected ways.

Book Review: Welcome to Opine

Nine billion years into the future, the rogue planet Earth is captured by a blue dwarf star in another galaxy, eventually culminating in the rise of Homo Sapiens 2.0.

Imagine a member of the ancient humans had buried deep in the earth a quantum computer containing a vast, digitized compendium of humankind’s history and achievements, all preserved within petabytes of quantum memory.

This new human civilization, calling their planet Opine and themselves the Opinions, the first “i” pronounced with a long vowel, were granted the valuable benefit of hindsight. After spending decades studying “Ancient” history, the Opinions endeavored to expunge selfishness from the human genome through a genetic therapy called the Self Suppressor.

But what happens when one person develops a natural resistance to the therapy? Would he then represent a threat to the gene pool? Will the Opinions be able to correct this genetic anomaly, or perhaps adapt it, in the interest of regaining a sacrificed part of their humanity?

One voice may know the answer. The voice of the man who originally buried the quantum computer billions of years ago…

Book Review: Silverskin

When Ellie Forth sets out to have a great Alaskan adventure with her remaining family members, she’s got something to prove—and not to them, but to herself. Four years after the unexpected death of her mother and sister, she’s ready to re-embrace her adventurous side.

Oliver Cole’s life, on the other hand, is very simple: go to work, catch fish, come home, and stash every penny earned into his bank account so he can afford to pay for college. But his life is turned upside down when Ellie and her brother—two nearly-forgotten acquaintances from his childhood—burst back into his life.

After a horrific encounter with the supernatural deep in the Kenai Peninsula, Ellie and Oliver must team up to discover the truth about what happened in Portlock, and how to fight a rising tide of evil that has the power to envelop not just Alaska, but the entire world.

Book Review: Call of the Blue Heron

After receiving a life altering phone call, Allie Gerard leaves her life in California and heads to the small country town of Hagerman, Idaho. The only explanation she leaves for her family and friends is that she’s finally getting the chance to try her hand at photography and refusing to let them know where. As Allie explores the beauty of Idaho through her camera lens she gets to know some of the locals, including Cash and Kat Brown, a father and daughter duo with whom she begins to spend her free time. Allie finds herself seated at the Brown’s dinner table a little more often than she’d expected and begins to fall in love with more than their simple way of life. As time passes, she finds herself struggling with the burning inside her heart and the echoes of her past, knowing she must make some hard decisions that could end up hurting more than her pride.

Book Review: Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia

Arguing that we have become culturally obsessed with healing trauma, Sexuality Beyond Consent calls attention to what traumatized subjects do with their pain. The erotics of racism offers a paradigmatic example of how what is proximal to violation may become an unexpected site of flourishing. Central to the transformational possibilities of trauma is a queer form of consent, limit consent, that is not about guarding the self but about risking experience. Saketopoulou thereby shows why sexualities beyond consent may be worth risking-and how risk can solicit the future.

Moving between clinical and cultural case studies, Saketopoulou takes up theatrical and cinematic works such as Slave Play and The Night Porter, to chart how trauma and sexuality join forces to surge through the aesthetic domain. Putting the psychoanalytic theory of Jean Laplanche in conversation with queer of color critique, performance studies, and philosophy, Sexuality Beyond Consent proposes that enduring the strange in ourselves, not to master trauma but to rub up against it, can open us up to encounters with opacity. The book concludes by theorizing currents of sadism that, when pursued ethically, can animate unique forms of interpersonal and social care.

Book Review: The Hag Rider

Written as a Civil War memoir, The Hag Rider explores fifteen-year-old Jack Benson’s transition to manhood as he tells his soldier’s account of life in the Confederate cavalry, a life convoluted by the spectral manipulations of Vanita, an old witch-woman who is sworn to protect him. Her hidden presence seems to protect Jack throughout the war in amazing ways, across countless miles, through patrols, battle, and capture.

Book Review: Well of Shadows

Alden Bramblethorn’s job at The Whispering Willow is wearing on him. But it’s not just that. His family is broken, and he has no living relatives. Lonely, he seeks answers from the GoldenRoot Ancestral Repository. It doesn’t take long for him to strike gold. There, he finds an ancient letter with a deed to Starshine Farm—a chance to leave everything behind, make real connections, and start over. And, besides, he’s a [Level 4] Chloromancer. Plants love him. Farming can’t be that difficult. Right? Well, turns out, it can. Especially when the property was abandoned one hundred years ago. Which begs the question: Why did his ancestor, Balthazar Wildewood, leave the farm behind and disappear? The people of Twilight Haven don’t know. Most are scared of the property, and don’t want anything to do with it. But all that changes when Alden grabs a shovel, and starts digging away.