J.R. Larriba’s Itsy Bitsy Spyder: Evolution starts as a gritty Marin County murder case and ends somewhere far stranger. The genre swerves can jolt you, but sharp banter, a creeping sentient fog, and real heart make this a wild ride worth taking.”
Tag Archives: Just Reading Nook
Spotlight: Dr. Dakota J. Miller
Dakota J. Miller wrote a Southern Gothic novella about a family fleeing the Salem witch trials. Then the internet came for him over AI. Here’s what actually happened, in his own words.
Book Feature: The Light of Arunzi by Katelyn Peterson
Have you ever picked up a fantasy novel expecting a chosen kid and ended up rooting for a stocky, balding, middle-aged cop instead? That’s what The Light of Arunzi did to me. It’s the debut novel in Katelyn Peterson’s The Magois Chronicles from Convergence Point Press, set in modern-day Toronto, where tactical police work and aristocratic magic share a city and do not get along. A hostage negotiation leads straight into a 3:00 AM knock at Greg’s door. From there, it turns into a story about who protects the helpless, and what that costs the protector. There are lion cubs, magical foals, and noble houses with long memories. But the heart of this book is a sergeant with a very bad habit of putting himself last. I have thoughts. Let’s get into it.
Spotlight: Timothy Robare
Robare writes across genres the way some people collect passport stamps. He has a gritty, humor-laced action series. A more traditional good-versus-evil fantasy. A character-driven novella. And poetry, which he calls his “main squeeze.” That range alone makes him worth a closer look. But it’s the story behind the range, how a kid who couldn’t hear or speak for years of his childhood ended up building an entire literary life out of words, that makes him worth sitting with.
Spotlight: C.J. Simone
‘ll be honest, when an author’s bio says “mafia thriller series,” I usually brace myself for a certain kind of book. Slicked-back hair, romanticized violence, a body count standing in for a plot. CJ Simone, author of suspense and dark psychological fiction and the mind behind the Children of the Mob series, isn’t writing that book, and the more I dug into her, the clearer it became that her real subject was never the mob at all. It’s the kids who grew up inside it, and what surviving that does to a person’s mind. Worth noting too, the mafia series is only one piece of what she does. Her catalog also includes The Gallos, a standalone psychological thriller about a girl invited into her wealthy neighbors’ home only to be framed for their abusive father’s murder, Pip and Estella, a gothic historical retelling of Dickens’s Great Expectations told in dual points of view, following two orphans, one raised humble and one raised wealthy but lonely, whose bond gets used as a weapon in someone else’s vengeful plan, and an upcoming gothic thriller, all of it united under what she calls dark psychological fiction meant to offer both thrills and something to actually sit with. That’s the spotlight I want to run today, not a review of one book, but a look at why this particular author keeps circling back to the same dark, family-shaped well.
Who Owns You? Dalton Wyers’s Debut Asks the Real Question
Dalton Wyers is thirty-one. A father of two. A season ticket holder for Oklahoma Sooners football. And, as of this year, a debut novelist with no MFA, no writing workshop history, and no pen name hiding any of it. He has two Master’s degrees and a stack of professional certifications, none of them related to fiction. He taught himself to write using craft books and YouTube, started for real last year, and had a finished novel, Arvo, in under twelve months.
From Prison Yards to Purple Prose — The Unlikely Journey of J.R. Larriba
There’s a moment in every writer’s life story that explains everything that comes after — the hinge point where the person and the pen finally meet. For J.R. Larriba, that moment came not at a writing desk, but sitting bolt upright in bed one morning, hearing a voice as clear as any conversation he’d ever had.
C. L. Sonnier and the World Beneath Under Martian Moons
What happens when a writer stops running from the dark and starts mining it for gold?
For C. L. Sonnier, the answer is a debut dystopian sci-fi novel that hits closer to home than most readers will expect.