Tag: ai

Bud Templin, Tales told around a Strange Fire (BookBaby 2025)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/236380072-tales-told-around-a-strange-fire?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_32

Other-worldly tales told around an other-worldly fire

Though these stories are all different and are not connected in terms of plot, the scene keeps returning to the Firefeeders’ Fire, where workers throw cart-loads of ‘stuff’ into an other-worldly fire, and the stories they tell while they work. The ‘chapters’ alternate between a story around the Fire and a story told around the Fire. The final chapter finally tells us how the Fire started.
These stories offer wonderful examples of good writing. A skilful, exciting style, and not same-y; each story is different. Different not only in content but in style as well. Superbly innovative ideas. I was impressed by the Intros of all these stories—the first lines and first paragraphs immediately hook you. Not only is the dialogue excellent, it conveys each character, each narrator brilliantly. I really admired the use of dialect to render the Voice of the old men in ‘Waitin on Satan’.
I loved the metaphors: ‘makes Sodom and Gomorrah look like Sesame Street’, ‘truck horns, like the vanguard of a barbarian horde’, ‘strong and bad as a Tyrannosaurus Rex’, ‘he felt as grand as the Tetons, as lucky as Luciano’.
I have loved ones who are hoarders, and all the references to cart-loads of ‘stuff’ was a bit triggering, not that it put me off the stories.

Kate Goss, The Client: A Domestic Psychological Thriller (Hylosis Publishing 2025)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/231652804-the-client?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_15

Who is that man beside you?

Newly-weds line editor Natalie and film editor David have been fighting—fighting about money. Natalie has lost her biggest client, Alan, and the couple’s finances are strained. They have even lost their home. In between job searching, she works on her novel, but her confidence is shattered. She even begins to have doubts about David. Her dog Barley and her husband do not get along.
Alan’s wife Amanda contacts her for information, and she learns that Alan hasn’t just ghosted her, he’s disappeared. For some reason, David is suspicious. Why had Alan been sending her travel pieces to edit, Amanda said he never travelled? A budding friendship with Amanda is stymied when Amanda accuses Natalie of ‘having an affair’ with her husband. That’s crazy, Natalie thinks, I’ve never even met the man in person, only emails.
I chuckled at Natalie’s comment: ‘How was I to know he never published any of the work he sent me?’ Since 1998 haven’t we all immediately Google searched every name we come across?
I thought the dog not liking David was a lovely bit of foreshadowing.
For many chapters, nothing much happens, then about 62% in, you sense a twist is coming. At 73%, it hits, and Amanda’s bizarre accusations begin to make sense. The twist is satisfying. Can you really trust that man beside you?
I didn’t, in the end, understand why Alan ghosted her.
A really fabulous cover, except that it looks like a cat, and her pet is a dog.

Adamos Zagara, Man, God, and the Man-gods of Antiquity (Archway Publishing 2023)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/192793592-man-god-and-the-man-gods-of-antiquity?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_56

Hominids knuckle-dusted around for millions of years; then, comparatively suddenly, towns and civilisations appeared. Were the heroes in the Sumerian and Egyptian kings lists descendants of gods?
As early as 5500 BCE in Mesopotamia, we began writing down creation stories, but they had been circulating orally for 1000s of years before that. The ancient ‘temple’ of Gobekli Tepe dates to at least 9000-9500 BCE. Why didn’t we write stuff down then?
There were stories of a Great Flood. We know there was big one around 12,500 years ago when a sharp rise in global temperature melted ice caps (Zagara wrongly places the Biblical flood here—the Biblical flood dates more recently than that, probably 3600 BCE), with another dramatic global warming around 14,700 years ago. Hominids struggled during the intervening cold Younger Dryas Period, but they did not go extinct.
Where is all this leading? By about page 28 I figured where we were headed: 6000-12000 years ago God meddled with our DNA, or it was aliens.
The cited evidence reveals a metaphysical idealism approach, comparing dates of civilisation with dates of flood stories, yet neglecting to compare them with dates of agriculture, metallurgy.
Zagara says that the Sumerians had it right. Man was created ‘to serve the gods’, neglecting to mention that that was what defined human to human relations back then.
I agree with him on one point. The stories of ‘giants’ at the time of Noah could be our ancestors’ cultural memories of Neanderthals, who, yes, genetic research has proven, did mate with the daughters of men. And I am still attracted to the notion that pyramids were some kind of power-generating devices.
A global catastrophe—such as an asteroid hitting earth, a supervolcano eruption—could happen tomorrow. Will we be ready? Will we ever see God?
I love ancient history conspiracy theories, but for me, they need to be a bit better researched. There are all sorts of mysteries of the ancient world that are still unsolved, but it’s much more interesting to search for scientific explanations.