Gothic Revival

Michael Mullin

 

Typically when a person finishes a stage in life, they completely move on. No matter how close they were with friends, oftentimes the friends do not move with them to the next stage in life.

While Chris and Anne married after college, the other three friends of the group went their ways and lost touch with one another. However, years later, Eric offers to fly the four friends out to San Francisco for four days of fun—or rather a remake of an iconic 1816 literary event.

Author Michael Mullin writes the book in the third person but writes each chapter from one of the four friends’ point of view. A chapter is not dedicated to Eric’s point of view until near the end of the book. However, even then, the chapter does not specify Eric, but rather his nickname, Gregor, leading this character to be portrayed as more mysterious.

Because the five friends were all pursuing creative writing degrees in college, Eric proposes they write ghost stories as a tribute to Frankenstein, but the events that come about during the four days make the friends questions events and their surroundings.

Because the friends have a lot of history from when they were in college, there is a lot of backstory in this novel. However, Michael Mullin intersperses it with the current action and uses the backstory to build the characters and make them more well-rounded.

Gothic Revival takes five people from their everyday lives and builds suspense by placing them in a remote lake villa. One of the friends, who is clairvoyant, begins hearing and seeing things. And the housekeeper and her husband seem to know more than they should.

This book will grab your attention and be difficult to put down!

Hope Has a Cold Nose

Christine Hassing

Many Americans hold true to the values of our country and feel a calling to serve our country in the military. However, this military experience can take its toll on our service people, leading to veteran lives with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Christine Hassing, in her book Hope Has a Cold Nose, shares stories of over 20 military veterans and how their service dogs have helped them cope with PTSD. These amazing dogs have been able to sense the onset of a nightmare and wake the veteran before the emotions take hold.

Many of these stories begin with the veteran sharing why they chose to join the military and their commitment to serving their fellow Americans, their low point in feeling lost and unable to reintegrate into society, and then how working with service dogs have benefited their lives.

In these pages, the author uses these powerful and very insightful stories to show how PTSD can change the entirety of a person’s life and how a trained dog can help heal emotional wounds. This collection of stories gives hope to those suffering from PTSD and their families and friends.

In the Time of Madmen

Author: Mark A. Prelas

This is a biographical and autobiographical story, primarily about the author’s parents through their struggles of hiding their true identities of Jewish ancestry.

Mark Prelas begins by describing what life was like during the Great Depression when his mother, Katheryn, who was born in 1921, was growing up. Life was hard — bartering was a regular occurrence and using money was a rare luxury — but it was good. And then at the age of 18, his mother was taken from her home to become a slave laborer in Germany.

The author shares a lot of historical information so the reader can understand what life was like for each of his parents growing up before and during the Great Depression, and then the effect of Germany invading Poland. The author describes each parent’s numerous near-death experiences and then the encounter of his parents meeting one another.

While not written in a narrative format, this journey relays important information about historical events that should be captured in time and in words for others to experience and learn from. This book provides remarkable details that the author was able to obtain before his mother’s passing in 2014.

As a special addition to the book, the author includes family photos and further holocaust resource information. The publication of this book is a wonderful tribute to the author’s parents.

The Scientist, the Psychic, and the Nut

Charlene Bell Dietz

 

A scientist is naturally filled with curiosity and a lot of questions, but when Beth discovers that her recently deceased Aunt Kathleen was her mother, Beth is filled with more questions and heartache about never truly knowing her biological mother, nor who her father was.

The Scientist, the Psychic, and the Nut is filled with suspense, history, and science — all happening simultaneously while Beth and her husband leave Colorado to go on a Caribbean vacation!

To escape the sadness of the loss of her aunt–mother (and honor a dying woman’s advice), Beth books a vacation to rekindle the love she had for her husband. However, Beth also plans to use the trip to look into the history of the area where her aunt–mother lived with her lover (and perhaps Beth’s father) for the last 50 years.

The author, Charlene Bell Dietz, captures the mundane in life while also adding a little bit of mystery to keep readers’ interest. She uses both dialogue and prose to show the bantering of two people who have been married for many years.

A book of love, loss, and change, The Scientist, the Psychic, and the Nut brings about mystery through Beth’s many questions and women’s intuition while her husband’s skepticism and the island residents aloofness keep her grounded in reality — but without any answers.