Affinities by Chris Hollis

Affinities by Chris Hollis

Wow! What a book!

Affinities is an unnerving, creepy psychological thriller. There is plenty of guesswork, with many twists and turns.

About Chris Hollis:

At an old wooden desk in a chilly sports hall, a teenage Chris Hollis first realised he wanted to write. The exam paper asked for a short scene about a person being chased. Chris ran over the word count.

Then he ran out of paper. Then he wrote on the back...

Many (enough) years later, he has developed a flavour for fast-paced fiction, and a sense of paranoia that has invited comparison to the likes of James Herbert, Kafka, and his main source of inspiration, H. G. Wells.

Other favourites include John Wyndham and the modern horror of Graham Masterton. Chris is always hard at work on the next thriller, with no shortage of ideas.

About Affinities:

I opened up Affinities to make sure that the file conversion had worked and that I didn’t have a garble of script in front of me, intending to get a proper start on it in the morning. Well, chapter one had me gripped and I found myself at the end of it before reminding myself it was well after midnight and that I had work in the morning. I also wondered whether it was the kind of thing to be reading just before sleep!

Chapter one was unsettling, drawing on the common fear around what happens when I go to sleep? The scratching and scuffling noises which Andrew hears at night were truly frightening, rather than falling into the children’s night-time monsters category. Having not read the blurb, seen the cover or read any more of Hollis’ work, I wondered if I had picked up a horror, happy to return it in the morning.

I’m very pleased that I didn’t. The story unfolded quickly. Andrew Goodwin is a man whose life has come apart at the seams. The reader comes in when he is at his lowest, and strange noises haunt him at night. He realises that he is losing whole days of his life, sleeping through all daylight hours, and only managing to stay awake for a couple of hours every night.

I won’t say anything more about the clever plot, as the less informed a reader is (as I was), the more likely s/he is to enjoy the book. The reveals are well-timed and well-explained. Hollis allows his readers the odd prediction, timed perfectly so that they can pat themselves on the back for being so clever when they turn out to be right.

My only negative comment is that the first section of the book does tend to go on for a bit. I realise now that this is necessary - the blow-by-blow of Andrew’s waking hours is important so that later the reader can piece together his days and nights - but still, it did begin to drag. Alright, this is weird and frightening, something odd is happening to him and he’s afraid; I get it - what next? If that section had carried on for much longer with the questions not being answered, I would have been in great danger of skipping pages.

The quality of Hollis’ writing is excellent. His use of language flows well without feeling forced or repetitive. His depiction of paranoia is beautiful to behold, and very believable. Hollis’ roots in Wyndham and HG Wells are clear. Most of his characters are well rounded, with all their hard lines and soft curves. I haven’t got a good grasp of Isabel yet but I do notice that she will be further teased out in his second book of this series.

Affinities is Hollis’ first book in his Lifecycle Series. The second, Outshine, is due to be released later this year, and deals with some of the characters his readers met in Affinities.

All in all, wonderful work. I very much enjoyed reading the book and am thrilled to have been able to review it.

Big thumbs up, with four and a half stars out of five.

Where you can find Chris Hollis online:

His website http://www.chrishollis-author.com/

His Goodreads profile https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3161788.Chris_Hollis

Affinities on Amazon http://www.amazon.com/Affinities-Lifecycle-Book-Chris-Hollis-ebook/dp/B00BSXO9CI/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1404943141&sr=8-1&keywords=affinities

The Diary of Nicholas Oldman by MG Atkinson

H’mmm… where to start…

The Diary of Nicholas Oldman is a fanciful flight into the prehistoric past. It is 272 pages that explore the question: “how would modern man survive alongside dinosaurs?”

About MG Atkinson

MG Atkinson has an eighteen-year-old daughter who, he says, is going on thirty. He is currently employed as a Steward for a cancer care hospice, but writing has recently become a passion and he published his first book, The Diary of Nicholas Oldman, on Kindle in August 2014. His favourite book of all time is Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. He says that he has lost count of the number of times he has read it.

About the Diary of Nicholas Oldman

MG Atkinson has a flair for description and wordiness. He takes ten words where I would use one. This is not a bad thing, in fact I envy authors who can do this. I sit in front of my screen for hours on end, willing my short paragraphs to turn into entire chapters, but it seems I simply don’t write this way.

Atkinson, however, does it well and does it consistently. 272 pages of descriptive language, and I can feel the hot sun of the desert on my parched lips, I can feel the danger lurking just beyond my eyesight in the jungle, and I can feel the buoyancy of the raft beneath me. I take my hat off to him for this. His descriptive scenes were mesmerising and beautiful, clad in elegant language which encouraged me to keep reading.

However, I do have some caution to give. The shape of the book was non-existent. Nothing happened.

Or rather, everything happened.

Constantly and without rest, the reader is bombarded with adventure after adventure, the book becoming a series of anecdotes about survival in a prehistoric landscape burgeoning with danger. And I suppose that is exactly what a diary is. A compilation of anecdotes which come together to give a picture of an individual’s ongoing daily struggles. However, there is a reason why we don’t publish our teenage diaries. Diaries lack shape, are often disjointed, and are thoroughly egocentric. All of which this book is.

I have no solution to the egocentricity. Nicholas Oldman is, quite simply, the only human on the planet. Therefore the book will be centred on himself, as there is no-one else to write about. However, the repetition of the first pronoun begins to give the book a vaguely indulgent air.

I struggled to get a grasp on his character, which seems an odd thing to say after complaining that “it’s all about Nicholas”. However, I wonder if much of our perception of characters comes through the eyes of others, and through their interaction with other characters, and this of course is lacking here. There is no opportunity here to see Nicholas through anyone else’s eyes. Perhaps the addition of some stories from his life “before” would help here.

The book trudged on, and I trudged with Nicholas, him in search of somewhere to live, me in search of some purpose to the whole thing. The same level of alertness and emotional investment was kept throughout, and then suddenly, at the end, an epilogue. There is someone else in the book; there is another storyline! I loved this part, but wondered if bringing it in and out throughout the 272 pages would have added more intrigue. An extra thread to weave into Nicholas’ trudging. The finding of the bones, the classifying, the inspection, the missing of their importance, then, finally, on the day of his birth, the revelation.

I love this description around page 200 when Nicholas discovers his raft, which he had thought to have lost, and is so desperate to get to it.

“I remember pacing the bank up and down like a trammelled wild thing, looking out over the river and at my raft some hundred-odd metes away. My eyes never left the raft, even as I turned to pace back the other way, my body swivelled beneath my head and my eyes stayed firmly fixed on my target. Its outline was sparkling with that hunters gleam that only my frenzied eye could see.”

It becomes clear to the reader that Nicholas is going mad, the days of isolation and his sole focus on survival at all cost taking their toll. However, the beautiful description which unfolds to us is then kinda blown away a few paragraphs later by him telling us that he had gone mad. Summarising in case we had missed it. The spelling out of such a situation dulls its effect for me, and as I reader I personally prefer not to be spoon-fed.

This book is a fantastic debut. Atkinson had an idea, and saw it through. It was a mammoth task, and I cannot imagine the hours of work in penning and honing that has gone into it. It is near perfect in terms of grammar and style, and I know that there will be many fans of descriptive work who will adore this book, and be relieved when they find that there will be more.

You can find out more about MG Atkinson on his webpage here.

You can download The Diary of Nicholas Oldman here.

You can read about it on Goodreads here.

Stranger at Sunset by Eden Baylee

About Eden Baylee

Eden Baylee left a twenty-year banking career to become a full-time writer. Incorporating some of her favorite things such as travel, culture, and a deep curiosity for what turns people on, her brand of writing is sensual, sexual, and literary.

June 30, 2014 saw the release of her first novel, a psychological mystery set in Jamaica called Stranger at Sunset.

About Stranger at Sunset

One word to describe the novel would be lengthy.

I struggled with this aspect - it seemed to drag on and on through so many sections that it became hard work.

However, with my greatest bugbear out of the way, I can now dwell on far more positive aspects. What an entertaining story! We are told that our protagonist is Kate Hampton, who heads off to Jamaica for a holiday. Once there we meet a range of interesting and rather shady characters with different views of the world to bring to the table.

The book is written from multiple perspectives, which is fascinating. With the skill of a juggler the author manages to get inside the head of so many different mindsets. I found it unusual that Kate’s viewpoint seemed to receive as much attention as anyone else’s, but this also made the story intriguing. At some points she almost retreated into the backdrop, and I can see now the author’s purpose for this. Baylee gives each character his or her due in terms of background and motivation, although the reader may have to wait in suspense to piece all the crumbs of clues together.

It reminded me of Poirot, stuck on a train with a murderer (or two or three). Certainly all the elements of a good Agatha Christie are here. Interesting characters. Chance encounters. History. A dead body. A wonderfully lavish and exotic location. But Baylee throws the prescriptive “whodunit” bible out the window and writes to her own tune, which was hugely refreshing and so enjoyable.

First of all, the murder happens in the prologue, just vaguely, through someone else’s eyes (or binoculars, actually). Not too unusual, you may think. But then we go back in time and hear about everyone arriving at the resort, and the murder itself occurs blow by blow before our eyes half way through the book. However, and here’s the twist, the reader can’t actually be too sure who the murderer and victim are. Or even, in Poirot terms, who will play detective? And who has a history with the victim? A lover? A business partner? A family member? The victim is named fairly quickly, but the red herrings for the identity of the murderer continue until the very last part of the book, and the motivations left hanging till the final page.

The roles which Baylee has given her protagonist are numerous, and extremely clever. I have never encountered a main character quite like Kate Hampton. I did not like her, which tainted my opinion of the book (it is difficult to enjoy a book whose main character you dislike), but luckily she is not front and centre all the time. Her greatest gift is her amazing mind. At times she waves away others’ compliments of her stunning memory, even though she’s the one asking about their mother-in-law by name. I found that she is at times strong and confident, at others frustratingly submissive or even foggy, and at the end, when it really sealed my opinion of her, a petulant child. There are fuzzy areas at key points in the book where I couldn’t get a handle on what she was thinking at all, and although I understand it now, I found this difficult to accept in a main character.

Baylee can write. I found the pace and timing of the flow of the story a little off; the clues unusually spaced, the reveals a little mistimed. But there is no denying that she writes well, in terms of structure and grammar. And in a writer I think this is important. I also think it’s important for a writer to have a sense of humour, which Baylee clearly has. I’m not saying that Stranger at Sunset is a comedy, or that it’s full of caricatures. What I am saying is that Baylee writes not only with passion and verve, but also at times with her tongue firmly in her cheek. And this is what I appreciate most about a writer; that they can enjoy and embrace the subtleties and expectations of their genre whilst having a little smile to themselves too.

All in all, this story is a find for Indie readers and for fans of mysteries - especially if you like a little bit of twisting!

Stranger at Sunset is Eden Baylee’s first novel and she is currently writing a second plunge into Kate Hampton’s world. However, if you are desperate to get your hands on more of Baylee’s work, she has published many novellas and short stories. To find out more, visit www.edenbaylee.com

 

Now available in print!

After months of fine tuning, Unworthy is now print ready and available for purchase from my Create Space shop. Click here to be taken to the purchasing page and to find out the cost of shipping to anywhere in the world.

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Goodreads Book Giveaway

Unworthy

by Joanne Armstrong

Giveaway ends October 07, 2014.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

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Cover Reveal

I finished formatting the ebook version of Unworthy at the start of June, and it was first uploaded on the Smashwords website on 19 June. Since then I've been ironing out some hiccups with the digital copy of the book, and I finally feel ready to make a print copy.
It's been a lot of fun working with Tatiana from Vila Design to make a new cover, and I was able to extend the design to work for an entire dustsheet.
Proof copies are on their way, and my fingers are crossed for print versions to be available from the end of August.
I will keep you posted!
Here's the look of the new cover...

Prologue to Book 2

Just a quick note: this is the start of Book TWO - if you haven't yet read Unworthy, do that first!
Here are two places you can purchase the book: Smashwords ($2.99) and Amazon ($3.07).
A bargain at both outlets! You can view 20% of the book before you purchase.

This is actually the FIRST chapter I wrote about Arcadia's world. It is the start of the book I want to write... then I decided that I would start the story as if I were Arcadia, knowing nothing of her past, and that Book 2 would be everything she learns when she eventually arrives in the Polis.
So essentially Book 2 is the Prequel. But the reader learns of it as though they are in Arcadia's shoes - ie as the second book and not the first.

There will need to be a couple of changes before it is finalised, but this is the draft of the Prologue to Book 2. As with Book 1, it is from the point of view of one character in the book, who we don't hear from again, although don't worry - he'll be around! Nikau is my favourite character.

Anyway, here it is.

Book 2 - Kassandra's Story (Working Title)

 

Prologue

Nikau

My days at the hospital are filled with repetition. I see little of disease, which has all but been wiped out in the city. The wounds of battle seldom reach us here; our military is far too good for that. And above all, the people are strong, resilient, and suffer silently.

I pity them.

I’ve heard of Pures who choose to die rather than come in seeking assistance. It doesn’t surprise me anymore. Too proud. I was walking home one night when I found a guy lying in the gutter, beaten up. When he came to, he shrank away from me so fast you’d think I was the one doing the robbing. I couldn’t get him to come with me; he wouldn’t even let me bandage his arm where he was bleeding.

They’re going to kill themselves off at this rate. If it weren’t for the babies, babies, babies… constantly I’m testing babies. It’s the hardest part of my job.

Most of the time they pass the test. Just a quick heel prick, sample the DNA, record the results. Apply the nano-patch and wait. Twenty-four hours later the baby’s still perfect. Not a trace of infection, rash, or allergy. But at least once a week there’s an anomaly, and it’s deemed Unworthy. The Unworthy ones, I mark on the wrist and tell the mother. The mother takes them away and I won’t see them again. It’s not easy, but it’s the law.

Some days I think I will never understand them. It made sense when food was so scarce that raising only the strong was sensible. Noble, even, to think ahead for the future of your race. But that was so many generations ago that even my father’s father would not have remembered want. Nowadays it seems unnecessary, but you won’t catch me questioning their laws. I learned that lesson long ago, and bear the marks in case I should ever forget.

I am awakened from my thoughts by my beeper. Called to the desk, I see a woman standing there, straight and tall. Her back is to me but I already know she is Ephori, from her stance, how she wears her hair, how she dresses. How she commands attention even when she looks a little lost and out of place. I smirk. I’m going to have to watch my p’s and q’s today.

Then she turns, and time stops. Her eyes flit around the room, looking for someone – looking for me. Her hair is held back, bound tightly at the base of her neck, but I see it loose, falling in wave after golden wave past her shoulders and down her back.

It’s been years. Three years and… nearly five months. But as soon as I set eyes on her I swear that the smell of her skin - dried salt and sunshine - reaches my nostrils. I can feel the warmth of her lips and the sand under my feet. It feels like only yesterday. It feels like a lifetime ago.

I realise that my feet have stopped, and that I am staring. My hands have dropped to my side. I blink and start moving again, and it takes a huge effort of will not to run the distance between us and fold her in my arms.

She watches me negotiate the furniture between us and smiles. “Doctor?” she asks. All I can do is nod. “I need to speak with you in private.”

As I lead the way to my office, I wonder if she has recognised me. Not a flicker passed her eyes. Does she not remember me? No, she knows exactly who I am. She did ask for me by name, after all.

There is an awkward silence after we sit. I clear my voice. Once. Twice.

“You are well?” I ask. This is a hospital. I am a doctor. She is heavily pregnant. The intelligent mind begins to make an appearance.

“I am very well, thank you. You look… well.”

She does too. She’s pregnant, and blooming. She looks vibrant and she looks stunning. Instead I ask about her family. All Pureborn women love to talk about their families.

At the thought of her family, her eyes soften and she smiles. She looks into the distance and tells me that she has a son who is walking. She has not mentioned her husband.

“Your husband…” I begin.

“Does not know I am here.” She looks at me intensely, her mouth in a tight line. The implication is very clear, and I remember exactly who he is. He could have my head for this. And hers. But that wasn’t what I had been about to ask.

“Does he treat you well?” I ask quietly. I lean forward. I know these men. I know how Pureborn men treat their wives and their children. I see the physical effects of their cruelty, those that are too damaging to hide behind closed doors, to leave for nature to heal. I don’t want to know that she is unhappy. I have spent too many nights wondering whether her husband could be any better than the others, wondering whether her broken body will be the next one I have to mend after “falling down the stairs”. But I also don’t want to know that she is happy. I couldn’t bear that either. I clasp my hands together to hide the shaking, and I force my eyes to look into hers.

“I’m not here about him.”

So I wait, and she asks me to do something unthinkable.