After eight hundred years of searching for the champion, madness descended. Pastiche screamed and waved his sword at the trees of the last ancient forest, yelling the name of the enchanter who cursed him to find the champion. Could it be the old police chief? The estranged son? The abused daughter? As thick branches creaked in the wind, mad laughter tore the sky: "Curse you, Mydrrin!"
Bare with Eric. Once you love him, the story does the rest in a humours and cynical take on immortality.
excerpt: full review on Reedsy. No spoilers here.
Death of Immortalityâ by Sky King frustrated me at first. I didnât like the protagonist Eric, and therefore it felt as though it was going to be a long read â as is often the case when you canât relate to a main character. However, he grew on me, and therefore so did the story. His humour actually added depth to his character, as it fell perfectly with his quirky mentality. Once Iâd invested in him, the story and subject matter gripped me with action and intrigue in abundance, intertwined with twists that kept me guessing.
Once I learnt to love Eric, the characters gripped me. There are only a handful of main players, but they are all strong and have a unique identity, making them engaging and (even when you know they shouldnât be at times) loveable. What makes them so great is the shifting motives they have, and as a reader this makes them difficult to predict. I thought I knew them, but theyâd ended up surprising me on multiple occasions.
REVIEWED BY
Christian Haywood is a well known and respected literary blogger. He can be found on Reedsy.
Book Synopsis:
Iâm not Methuselahâs kid. I wasnât there for the birth of the Child in the manger and then for Word War two. I wasnât with the robots when the sun came up either. And I certainly wasnât cutting off anyoneâs head in the highlands, having any part of the weapon shop that caused the big bang, being born as a Star Child, or spending one thousand years chanting in Sanskrit. Sorry!
I did see Nikita Khrushchev bang his shoe on a podium and say, âWe will bury you.â I was there before Eisenhowerâs interstate highway system was finished and heard the news the day the music died. I was also there when the Institute for Immortality Research found that I was the one candidate genetically suited to be âfixedâ so that I could live for five thousand years. I said no. Why would I want to outlive everyone I cared about, go on and on like reruns of Friends? One million dollars? The companionship of a lovely, intelligent red head? No and no again. I might wind up like Tithonus and I already felt like Sisyphus.
So, you say Iâm crazy: a million dollars; a lovely red head? Try black government site, need to know and who trusts the US government? Most likely Iâd be âharvestedâ and kept in a cage.
Unfortunately, both figuratively and literally, choice is an illusion. Or as my friend Ray said, âWhat the fuck donât you get about becoming practically immortal?â That was just before he and Chloe betrayed me, and I had to run. Run Eric, run!
Paul's life as a thirty year old beach bum was built around surfer friends, parties, the sound of the ocean, and a solitary existence in the last outermost house on Cape Cod. When he found his old girlfriend Penny murdered, he became of interest to the police, and to someone else who thought Penny might have given him something valuable. All he could do was gather a motley crew of surfers around him, and seek help from Arthur Dean Kaminski, an emotionally damaged Vietnam vet who knew how to survive in the toughest of circumstances. And the circumstances were about to get very tough.
Title and Cover Change. Formerly Walter and Clarissa.
Look twice for The Dead Wife
in the deep dark
in the daily grind
in the recesses
of your broken mind.
Can you be forgiven?
Sky King is a writer, teacher, father husband, and grandfather. A child of the nineteen sixties, he ran wild in his free time but was bound tight at the Catholic school he attended. This dichotomy spawned a vibrant imagination and expansive sense of humor. Achieving a bachelors degree in writing and a masters in education he went on to work with the cognitively disabled for most of his life. Taking a few years off to write while his daughter was small he wrote Deep Time, and The Dead Wife.
He currently works as a special education teacher taking his summers to write, edit and e-publish his books. He is a fan of fantasy and science fiction novels, as well as stories of mystics from history. He enjoys stories with emotional authenticity and aims to create this in his own writing. As an avid reader, the stories shared here are those that he feels he would be excited to find while looking for a new read. We hope that you will be equally as excited to find these stories as we are to present them.
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