Author of sci-fi/fantasy, horror and adventure/thriller fiction

ARMOR Series Debuts

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From Craig DiLouie, the bestselling author of the CRASH DIVE WW2 submarine adventure series, ARMOR is a new WW2 series that chronicles the journey of a tank crew through the Second World War, from North Africa to Berlin. Action-packed, authentic, and filled with flawed but tough men of the Greatest Generation, ARMOR drops the reader into the horror, brotherhood, and triumph of armored warfare.

Readers will fight alongside the crew as they go head to head with Tigers at Kasserine Pass (ARMOR #1: THE BATTLE OF NORTH AFRICA, February 7), race to Palermo in Sicily (ARMOR #2: THE FIGHT FOR SICILY, February 28), land during the horrific first assault wave at Omaha Beach on D-Day (ARMOR #3: FORTRESS EUROPE, March 27), survive Hitler’s last blitzkrieg in the Battle of the Bulge (ARMOR #4: THE BULGE, April 24), and batter their way into the heart of Nazi Germany, where the war ends, and they can now go home (ARMOR #5: REICH’S FALL, May 22).

All the while, the reader will live with the crew in the cramped, noisy, and vulnerable fighting machine that was the American Sherman tank, alternately criticized as “deathtraps” and praised as the “tank that won the war.” With appeal to tank, history, and action buffs, ARMOR pays equal attention to the Sherman tank as the men who fought in it. An enormous amount of research went into providing rich detail about the history, locales, and armored warfare. Thematically, these stories explore how men come together (or don’t) in combat, the things they do to stay sane and endure the horrors of war, how men must learn to survive the peace after surviving war, and why the Greatest Generation put their lives on the line to defeat the Nazis. While fought for the noblest cause, WW2 was also history’s most brutal conflict, the cost of which was staggering, with another cost paid by many of the veterans for the rest of their lives.

The books are available in eBook and trade paperback exclusively through Amazon.com. The omnibus will release June 26 along with the audiobook, narrated by Garrett Michael Brown. The covers, which imitate propaganda posters of the period, were designed by Eloise J. Knapp.

Click here to check it out. Thanks for reading!

FIRST ARMOR REVIEW!

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While ARMOR is historical military fiction and not sci-fi/fantasy, the Sci-Fi and Fantasy Reviewer enjoyed my previous work and decided to take on ARMOR, calling it an “instant classic of World War II historical fiction.”

The Reviewer added: “It is brilliantly written, populated with realistic and entirely human characters who stay with you long after finishing the last page, and is searingly, unflinchingly open about the realities of combat during World War II as experienced by the crew of an M4 Sherman medium tank. It takes the best elements of the dime store genre and blends it seamlessly with DiLouie’s inherent skill as a writer and his phenomenal imagination … a timely and welcome reminder of just what the Allies were fighting against, and what it was like to be a part of the spear tip of the American advance during the turning of the tide against the Axis regimes.”

Thank you, Sci-Fi and Fantasy Reviewer!

Click here to check out the complete review.

TANKERS (2018)

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Inspired by true events, TANKERS (2018) is a Russian movie about the crew of a KV-1 tank during 1942, at the darkest point in the German invasion. Like the similar American film FURY, which was about a Sherman Easy Eight tank, TANKERS takes plenty of liberties with tank combat but overall delivers the grit, realism, and tension of a great war movie.

During the first year of the invasion, the Soviets had about 500 KV1 heavy tanks in the field. While the new T34 tanks were superior in many respects, the KV1s had one big advantage, which was their heavy armor, almost impenetrable by the German Panzer IIIs and IVs. A single KV1 could hold up large formations, and in one desperate battle, a crew managed to destroy 16 German tanks and 10 other vehicles in the Rostov region.

The film begins with Captain Konovalov receiving command of a new tank after his platoon is knocked out. His KV1 is fairly broken down, and he has to scavenge for spare parts. This is a great part of the movie, the portrayal of the Russian tankers as basically mechanics desperate to keep their machines going. Otherwise, aside from Konovalov, we don’t get much more from the crew, though they’re distinctive and likeable. Adding to the drama is a female engineer shows up who is a wizard at fixing tanks, who happens to be Konovalov’s estranged wife. You can see where this is going, and there isn’t much more happening than that. But it’s a lot of fun.

The film is fairly accurate in terms of how the tanks worked, what they could do, and how a crew operated one of these big war machines, though some sacrifices are made for drama–similar to the way FURY’s Sherman took on a large body of SS, who surely would have wiped out Fury with some panzerfaust, among other things that didn’t add up. Most notable was the tankers weren’t as terrified as they would be, and there was little hustle in tank during the fights to get shots off (something FURY did really well), which bled a lot of tension out of the combat scenes.

Overall, it was a basic, fun war movie.

CRASH DIVE Audiobook Omnibus Books 4-6 Released!

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I’m happy to announce books 4-6 of the popular CRASH DIVE WW2 submarine series are now available as a packaged omnibus listen at Audible.com. This includes BATTLE STATIONS, CONTACT!, and OVER THE HILL.

BC Bray narrated the series and delivers a truly powerful performance. He really makes the books come alive.

You can get it here.

If you’re new to CRASH DIVE, you can get the first three books as an omnibus here.

Writing CRASH DIVE was an amazing experience for me as a writer, and I was sorry to say goodbye to it. I’m currently developing another series about tankers.

SciFiandFantasyReviewer.com Reviews BERLIN OR BUST

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Sci-Fi and Fantasy Reviewer recently reviewed BERLIN OR BUST, writing, “BERLIN OR BUST is another brilliant entry in THE FRONT series, and does Mr. DiLouie great credit as a horror author. Well thought-out characterizations, even and compelling pacing that ramps up to a brutal close-quarters rampage through undead Berlin in the last third of the book, and consistently vicious and often horrifying action scenes, all combine to create a blood-spattered, memorable and above-all deeply enjoyable title that serves as a rare example of how to do military horror right.”

Thank you, Sci-Fi and Fantasy Reviewer!

Click here to check out the complete review.

CUTTHROATS by Robert Dick

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Robert Dick’s CUTTHROATS is another WW2 tank memoir, this one by a tanker who fought in the Pacific against Imperial Japan, specifically on the islands of Leyte and Okinawa.

With an excellent memory, Dick starts with the attack on Pearl Harbor and resulting training. His stories of Army life in the infantry on the home front are quite funny. Soon, he goes to Hawaii to train to become a tank driver, and then he’s shipped off to fight in the invasion of the Philippines in Tank 60, Company C, which the crew names CUTTHROATS.

On Leyte, the mud bogs down the 30-ton tanks, which struggle to support the infantry in chaotic jungle fighting. More often than not, the tanks served as indirect artillery. On Okinawa, the tanks took a stronger role, blasting enemy infantry out of caves and bunkers while suffering incredible losses from mines, suicidal soldiers with satchel charges, and very effective anti-tank guns. Dick’s tank is equipped with a flamethrower, which during its first attack against a cave ended up nearly setting fire to itself.

While John Irwin’s ANOTHER RIVER, ANOTHER TOWN is a very focused narrative about the savage town-to-town fighting in Germany at the end of WW2 from a tanker’s perspective, Dick’s account is more anecdotal and often action-packed, absurdly humorous, and tragic by turns. A wounded civilian woman with a baby, abandoned out of fear she was being used as bait for enemy fire, a tanker shattered because he couldn’t pull his wounded lieutenant through the escape hatch and had to leave him, harrowing misses by AT guns, souvenir shopping in enemy camps, a Japanese casualty collection hut filled with corpses–Dick’s account is filled with small stories that tell the big story of one man’s war and the war itself.

Overall, CUTTHROATS is an excellent memoir about the life of a tanker in the Pacific in WW2. Recommended for history buffs.