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THE CHILDREN RED PEAK On Sale for $2.99 Through March 31

March 13, 2022 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

The Children of Red Peak is a Kindle Monthly Deal throughout March 31, 2022! It’s priced at just $2.99.

David Young, Deacon Price, and Beth Harris live with a dark secret. As children, they survived a religious group’s horrific last days at the isolated mountain Red Peak. Years later, the trauma of what they experienced never feels far behind.

When a fellow survivor commits suicide, they finally reunite and share their stories. Long-repressed memories surface, defying understanding and belief. Why did their families go down such a dark road? What really happened on that final night?

The answers lie buried at Red Peak. But truth has a price, and escaping a second time may demand the ultimate sacrifice.

“A heart-wrenching, thought-provoking, terrifying tale about the meaning of life . . . A great choice for fans of Stephen Graham Jones’ The Only Good Indians (2020), Paul Tremblay’s Disappearance at Devil’s Rock (2016), or Alma Katsu’s The Hunger (2018).” – Booklist

Get it here.

 

 

Filed Under: Apocalyptic, APOCALYPTIC/HORROR, Books, CRAIG'S WORK, MEDIA YOU MIGHT LIKE, The Blog, The Children of Red Peak

STRIKE Released!

March 11, 2022 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

STRIKE, my new WW2 novel, officially releases today at Amazon!

Written as a follow-up to my WW2 fiction CRASH DIVE and ARMOR, STRIKE is a standalone novel about a dive-bomber pilot serving in the Pacific during the Second World War.

In December 1941, Ensign Harry Hartmann reports for duty at Pearl Harbor. He’s a “nugget,” a dive bomber pilot about to start his first deployment aboard the USS Enterprise.

Hell rains from the skies as the Japanese launch a surprise attack. With the Bombing Six, Harry takes to the skies seeking vengeance and finds himself fighting for his life in breathless, high-speed aerial combat over the Marshall Islands.

After the Doolittle Raid rattles Tokyo, the Imperial Japanese Navy embarks on a bold plan to draw America’s aircraft carriers into the open, where they can be destroyed. Their target: Midway Island. But the Americans have cracked the Japanese codes and have prepared their own trap.

With the call, “Pilots, man your planes,” Harry will join the carrier strikes that aimed to turn the tide of the Pacific War.

STRIKE tells a powerful and exciting story about this pivotal battle—examining courage in the face of impossible odds, the demands of honor, and whether one man can make a difference.

The novel is available as a Kindle eBook and trade paperback. The audio edition is coming soon.

I hope you enjoy the adventure. Thanks for reading!

Filed Under: Books, CRAIG'S WORK, Strike, Submarines & WW2

THE THREE-BODY PROBLEM By Cixin Liu

January 28, 2022 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

Chinese author Cixin Liu’s Hugo Award-winning THE THREE-BODY PROBLEM is certainly an intriguing piece of science fiction, rich in ideas if thin in plot and characterization. A mixed bag, though on the whole I quite enjoyed it as something bold and original.

The plot description is pretty simple. During China’s Cultural Revolution, a secret military project ends up communicating with an alien civilization on the brink of destruction. Forced to emigrate, this civilization decides to travel to Earth. During the long wait, factions form on Earth, some planning to welcome the superior beings and help them take over a world seen as irredeemably corrupt, and others planning to resist.

At first, I thought this was an alien contact story set during the Cold War, with a Maoist China making first contact, but the Cultural Revolution only serves as the backdrop for the genesis story. The story soon jumps ahead in time to the present day to a new protagonist, a scientist struggling with a string of connected mysteries that lead him to the truth about the aliens.

Reading reviews, I noticed that some readers criticized the mostly tell and not show plot, wooden dialogue, and thin characterization, and I can’t argue with any of that. For example, the protagonist has a wife and son we meet near the beginning but pretty much never hear of again. Where the novel excels is in its ideas, sense of a scientific mystery, and beginnings in the what can only be called insanely turbulent years of the Cultural Revolution. These elements really grabbed me, and while I didn’t particularly care about the characters aside from perhaps the clever but obnoxious cop, I stayed glued to the page to see where all these crazy ideas were going to take me.

So overall, I’d call THE THREE-BODY PROBLEM a highly enjoyable and original piece of science fiction, particularly enjoyable for its density of intriguing, interconnected ideas.

Filed Under: Books, The Blog

THE NEXT CIVIL WAR by Stephen Marche

January 18, 2022 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

In THE NEXT CIVIL WAR: DISPATCHES FROM THE AMERICAN FUTURE, Canadian novelist and essayist Stephen Marche examines America’s crumbling political foundations and imagines a series of scenarios that could spark a civil war. As with DON’T LOOK UP, many reviewers tut-tutted about its tone and nitpicked its plausibility. Personally, I thought it was frank, honest, and accurate in its analysis of why America appears caught in a fantasy and unable to solve its problems. It did miss one important element, however, in my view, which I’ll explain in a bit.

First, let me describe the book. Marche evaluates several fictional near-future scenarios that could start a civil war. He regards a civil war as likely occurring everywhere, a war largely fought between rural and urban, which I totally agree with and used in my novel OUR WAR. In THE NEXT CIVIL WAR, we have a standoff between the Army and a coalition of hard-right militias at a bridge, the assassination of an unpopular president, climate change producing mass migrations from coastal regions, a dirty bomb blowing up in Washington, DC, and outright secession and breakup of the union. Each scenario is loaded with background information for context.

This background info is the real education in the book, information I’d consider essential reading for Americans wondering why the country seemed stuck in a hostile malaise even before the pandemic made everything ten times worse. How elimination of earmarks (pork spending) eliminated the only basis of compromise in the two-party system, resulting in hyper partisanship. How the electoral college, the Senate, and gerrymandering warps democracy such that it can scarcely be called democracy (62% of senators represent 1/4 of the population, while 6 senators represent another 1/4, Democratic presidential candidates regularly win the popular vote but lose elections, etc.). How gridlock means America is becoming incapable of enacting major policies and confronting the greatest threats to its existence, which are income inequality and climate change, and how this fuels the rise of the imperial presidency, as the executive branch claims more and more powers simply to get something done. How Congress can’t even properly investigate an assault on itself by violent protesters seeking to overturn a democratic election result, with one of its major parties (the GOP, obviously) essentially having a political and a militant wing that are starting to work together. How social media manufactures and refines rage, helping to fuel a right wing terrorist movement. How hyper partisanship means everything becomes politicized along tribal lines, from Trump’s big lie about the election being stolen to whether people should take the basic self-preservation steps of wearing masks and getting vaccinated during a pandemic. The story of the woman literally drowning in her own COVID snot and fighting nurses trying to intubate her in the belief COVID is a government hoax, based on “doing her own research” on YouTube, is pretty much a defining image of these strange times we live in.

As for the scenarios that Marche presents as trigger points, they seem fair enough as major stresses on the system. What I think the book is missing is a major Constitutional issue that literally breaks the country. Marche logically concludes a match and kindling are what makes fire, but bringing the US to a literal state of civil war would require a healthy dose of gasoline, to extend the metaphor. Secession would do it, or an attempted or successful hard coup. In my novel OUR WAR, the civil war starts almost by accident, as far-right groups take over government buildings across the country as an armed protest over an impeached president that snowballs into something much bigger. Far more likely as a result of the depicted scenarios in Marche’s book would be civil strife, terrorism, government impotence and de-legitimization, and continuing decline. Civil war is very unlikely when it’s so much easier to simply take over the government through elections and rewriting election laws, and then stack the courts with friendly partisan hacks as we’re seeing with today’s Supreme Court.

In its conclusion, Marche nails the idea that America is itself an idea, a dream that creates a nation from what is really just another of history’s multi-ethnic empires. Political tribalism has destroyed this idea, or rather created parallel ideas, parallel Americas with different interpretations of government, history, and even basic reality. He wonders if the only solution is a divorce, where different regions of the country can be freed of each other to pursue their own dreams.

Overall, THE NEXT CIVIL WAR is a powerful if unhappy read. Even if you don’t agree the country is headed to civil war, the way Marche depicts the fault lines in American stability is compelling, provocative, and eye-opening.

Filed Under: Apocalyptic, Books, Politics, Reviews of Other Books, The Blog

REDEPLOYMENT by Phil Klay

December 31, 2021 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

Phil Klay’s REDEPLOYMENT is a collection of short stories about men serving in Iraq and Afghanistan or readjusting to civilian life. Brutal, raw, honest, and so nuanced it throws the very idea of PC out the window, it’s a brilliant analysis of humans at war and how war breaks everything.

Each of the twelve stories is told by a nameless veteran in first person. We don’t get to know them very well except through their experience, how it affects them, and how they describe it, providing a very intimate snapshot of a person’s life in or after war. Some of the narrators were directly in the thick of it while others at its periphery, though all in one way or another are affected.

What’s remarkable about these stories, written by a Marine Corps veteran who served in Iraq and conducted enormous research into war experiences of fellow veterans, is how raw and honest they are. The soldiers in his stories aren’t lionized as gung-ho, flag-waving, earnest young men, nor are they portrayed as utterly virtuous but pitifully broken pawns. No kid gloves here, and you’ll find no comforting and childish stereotypes. Popular political narratives on all sides are frankly challenged (and wrecked), though there’s no apparent political agenda on the part of the author aside from asking the reader to see these veterans as real people, take it or leave it and make up your own mind, an approach I found utterly refreshing. Nothing is contrived in each story, which simply tells it like it is from one veteran’s point of view, with all the good, the bad, the ugly, and the horrifying.

The moral of each story can be difficult to grasp, as it’s highly nuanced. Generally, there are themes of whether morality can co-exist with war, all shades of guilt and fear, survival, helplessness when death can come at any time by pure chance, and the struggle to find meaning in what was essentially chaos. In one story, a veteran who supports a friend who survived horrible burns finds himself caring but envious, in another a veteran takes on a comrade’s guilt over shooting an armed child to the point it becomes real to him, and in another a priest struggles to comfort a unit that has utterly demonized the enemy and is shooting civilians. The stories are tragic, delivered frankly and without judgment, and seem to focus on the idea that once war gets in your head, it can be difficult for some to get rid of it. They’re also very procedural, providing what at least appears to be an authentic view from the front lines of the global war on terror.

Overall, this civilian found the stories disturbing, thoughtful, powerful, and moving. I recommend the read.

Filed Under: Books, The Blog

MISSIONARIES by Phil Klay

December 27, 2021 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

Phil Klay’s MISSIONARIES is a hell of an interesting read, though it often works better on a nonfiction rather than on a literary level. Let me explain.

Klay is a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps and the author of REDEPLOYMENT, a collection about veterans that earned enormous accolades. MISSIONARIES is a fairly ambitious followup, the result of six years of research. In this novel, a war reporter in Afghanistan, war veterans turned military contractors, narcos, paramilitaries, and intelligence officers in Colombia evaluate, experience, and try to counter the endless cycle of violence and drug trafficking.

The story contains a great deal of fascinating information, written with authority and flair and backed by solid research. It has a documentary feel to it at some points, a brooding SICARIO feel at other points. I love how Klay doesn’t posit easy answers or inject a moral narrative. He just tells you how it is, and how it is is very, very complicated. For me, this is where the novel really shines, in how it holds up for inspection a slice of the War on Drugs as an endless, cyclical war. This is my favorite kind of fiction, where I learn something without feeling like I’m in school, and where I’m exposed to engaging and interesting ideas, of which MISSIONARIES has plenty.

Where the novel works less for me is there are a lot of characters, and despite connections here and there, they don’t really tie together until deep into the last act. I don’t mind a sprawling story, but it needs to tie together thematically early on and eventually through the plot, ideally sooner than near the end. MISSIONARIES has a theme, though I’m not sure what it is other than the War on Drugs became the War on Terror and is now one unending global war, often fought outside the news headlines. Each of the characters is in one way or another an elite playing their part in the game, and we never see them face any real moral dilemmas about the dirty game they’re playing. And the way everything ties together, with a central conflict that doesn’t reveal itself until the last act and then gets resolved pretty quickly and without much fuss, makes this novel more a powerful snapshot of people and ideas than a coherent narrative.

So overall, A+ for ideas and good storytelling at the ground level, more a B or B- for characters and the way the story comes together. In short, I liked it a lot for its positive qualities, and I’m gonna check out his REDEPLOYMENT.

Filed Under: Books, The Blog

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