James R. Clifford

A National Indie Excellence Award-Winning Finalist

This is one of the few books that I have ever intentionally read more than three times. It is one of those books where I found myself having to read it again and again to see if I could discover the secrets to the City of Pillars.

From the get go Mr. Peloso produces an ancient manuscript, men in black, a city that isn’t supposed to exist and one man’s journey into madness? Or maybe Sinclair isn’t crazy. Maybe . . . just maybe he has fallen into a wormhole past the narrow confines of Western notions of reason and scientific reality. As he decodes more and more about the secrets of the City of Pillars, Sinclair is pushed farther and farther outside the bounds of traditional society and is forced to discard his morality piece by piece to stay alive until he is forced to answer the question: How far am I willing to go to uncover the truth.

After reading this book I wonder how far I would be willing to go. I have often dreamed of the City of Pillars despite the realization that I truly hope that I never find Irem because if that door was opened to me . . . would I be able to go through it? Because the only thing I am certain of in this book is, once you cross the threshold and gain entrance to Irem you can never, ever come back.

I searched for more information and tried to contact the author through all the usual methods, all to no avail. The only things I know about him through third-hand and unreliable accounts is that he has interests in esoteric Gnostic religions, hermeticism, particle physics, 80’s dreampop and that he sometimes wears black but adamantly denies being affiliated in any way with the Knights Templar, Illuminati, or the Rosicrucians.

Like Irem, I wonder if Peloso whose name has a Kabbalistic value of 284 is really an illusion . . . .or maybe he discovered the City of Pillars.

Last note: I am really nervous about posting this.

Thanks for stopping by my Badlands Book Review Site. I love reading and my goal is to share with you books that I’ve read and enjoyed. For the most part my reviews are not for the type of books that you will find in Barnes & Noble. Nothing against Barnes & Noble but I’ve read everything in there and once you’ve done that, it is all the same. Anyway there are too many damn good authors and books out there that you won’t find covered by the “mainsteam” publishers, bookstores, reviewers, newspapers etc, so if you looking for a few of those type books hopefully you’ve come to the right place.

This site is dedicated to highlight what I like to call “non-mainstream” fiction. I love horror, science fiction conspiracies, paranormal activites, wormholes, reincarnation, supernatural thrillers, apocalypse, and end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it books etc. I also like books where the characters fall into the gray zone—where the good guys are bad and the bad guys are good.

Give me ufo’s, werewolves, men in black, zombies, unexplained phenomena, parallel universes, monsters, evil gnomes, sinister clowns, dream worlds—the weirder, the scarier, the more bizarre, all the better.

The only qualification for a book to be listed here is that I really like it.

City of Pillars

Dominic Peloso

Invisible College Press

ISBN:1-9311486-00-1

No matter how paranoid you are, you’re not paranoid enough. . .

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The Old Man and the Wasteland

Nick Cole

CreateSpace

ISBN: 1261076382

$10

Available Kindle $0.99

After a nuclear war what left of civilization is reduced to hardscrabble groups of scavengers still clinging to some type humanity and others who have lost any sense of human qualities and function only at animal-like capacities.

In a unique plot the author tells an original story in the rapidly overcrowded post-apocalypse genre. The Old Man is one of the few left in America who can remember what life was like before the bombs fell.

His village survives though scavenging what little is left in the bleak, desolate ruins of the Southwestern United States. The Old Man sets off alone on an unknown journey to try one last time to break the curse and find something that might possibly ensure his village’s future or die trying.

His prized possession is Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and his journey becomes a struggle of survival and endurance. I think it is a worthy twist on Hemingway’s Classic novel in the ultimate man against nature story. It is a short novel but like they say the shorter the sweeter and Mr. Cole delivers in serving up an excellent, poignant story of a man who teaches us all a lesson—Never Give Up.

The book can be purchased on Amazon Kindle for 99 cents and I give it 6 out of 7 skulls