novels

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It should be a summer like any other for imaginative ten-year-old Becky Muddler, filled with freedom and adventure, but she slowly comes to notice that things have changed. Her older sister, once her partner-in-crime and play, has begun to turn her attention to other interests, while her friend Krissy, the quiet younger girl next door, is acting even more withdrawn than normal. Trying to make sense of the changes, Becky will learn that not everything is as it seems, and that the world around her might be more treacherous than the stories she invents. Invasion of the Beekeepers is filled with the imagery of a young girl’s intense imagination, one alive with aliens and monsters and ghosts, as she explores the mysteries of her small-town… from the puzzling changes in her friends and family, to her father’s sudden interest in the keeping of bees, to the hunt for the illusive and monstrous Goat Man, who may or may not live in an abandoned house at the end of a lonely old road. Along the way she will learn about the nature of secrets and myths, and confront, for the first time, the reality of growing up.

Todd Michael Cox (Beast, Of Reptiles and Amphibians, Lost Creek Falls) allows his young narrator’s unique voice, at times both questioning and confident, graceful and awkward, to leads us into those moments when innocence and experience meet at the brink of a childhood’s end.

The past is past and memories are memories. And moments are meant to be here and gone.But what if you were given the chance to change that?In this memory-haunted novel, frustrated young father Mickey Fisher moves to a country subdivision with his loving wife and one-year-old son to begin a new kind of life for them all. One day he meets Vincent, the grizzled and mysterious neighbor who lives in the old farmhouse up the road. When the strangely magical Vincent reveals that he has the power to offer people the opportunity to live forever in one moment from their past, Mickey is suddenly confronted not only with memories and emotions, but with a growing uncertainty about the life he’s currently living and the person he’s become. Will he choose a moment and leave the here and now? And what does it mean to even contemplate the idea at all?

*Of Reptiles and Amphibians* follows a young Wisconsin man as he moves through a life of loss and discovery, depression and hope. From a broken family, to a brother haunted by mental illness, through relationships failed and fulfilling, we journey with him through several moments across the span of his life… and, always, guiding him, there are the animals he loves, the snakes and turtles and frogs and salamanders that, like him, call the Dairy State home… and which he looks to for comfort when life grows dark, seeking in them a sense of both belonging and solitude, understanding and mystery.Quiet, thoughtful, subtle, this is a “study in microtones,” as the author puts it in his introduction. It’s also a poem of heartbreak and transcendence, and an ode to finding once again that which has been lost.

After a chance meeting with the enigmatic and outspoken John Thomas Bantam, a third-party candidate for President of the United States, small-time union rep Greg Helter decides to leave his dull and safe Midwestern life and become the campaign manager for Bantam’s lost-cause Gadfly Party. He hires a former college friend to be the controversial candidate’s bodyguard, a menacing but intelligent mountain of a man named Jasper Callister with whom Helter shares the memory of a violent and disturbing event, and who may be harboring the combined anger and dissatisfaction of an entire nation within his giant body. With lonely and haunted amateur writer Lisa Yates riding along as the campaign’s embedded journalist, Helter soon finds himself on an increasingly strange journey across the Hawkeye State, seeking votes and personal redemption… and a cure for the madness of modern life.

Beast

Andy Hull has made a promise. He has vowed to care for his nephew, who suffers from a disorder so horrible it has left him a recluse and pushed away everyone he ever loved. But to what lengths will Andy go to fulfill this promise, and at what cost to himself or the woman he loves? Beast is a dark and intimate novel about a man who has made a promise to care for his ill nephew… who just happens to be a werewolf.

After the Death of the Ice Cream Man

When his troubled mother is killed in a car accident, Jonah Swain finds himself confronting the ghosts in his family’s complex past, images of depression and alcoholism which have scattered his family and threatened to close him off to love and happiness. As he embarks on a journey through an intricate landscape of memories and emotions, Jonah comes to realize he must finally face a vision of lost innocence that has disturbed him since childhood, and rise above a tangled past of heartbreak and estrangement. At times poetic and raw, filled with both anger and sadness, After the Death of the Ice Cream Man is a somber but ultimately transcendent meditation on death, mourning, and the rediscovery of love.

Dizzlemuck (Love in the Time of Wee Folk)

The town of Burghville is a peaceful place of backyard cookouts, quiet neighborhoods, Memorial Day parades, and rummage sales. But one Spring something new arrives, an invasive species of a sort no one could have imagined: a marauding band of mischievous and magical Scottish wee folk, foot-high anarchists with a taste for grass-root tea, front yard bonfires… and absolutely no respect for business as usual.

Other options for purchase:

Amazon

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