Announcing: Cryptozoology for Fun and Profit

I am beyond pleased to announce my Horror/Comedy novel, Cryptozoology for Fun and Profit, is set for publication by Black Lantern Press (an imprint of Velox Books)! Mark your calendars! Get your pre-order fingers ready!

Cryptozoology for Fun and Profit releases to the public October 2, 2026, just in time for spooky season. Delightful cover art by the talented Drew Huff.

 

Fake hunter. Real monster. No refunds.

Helen Novacic makes a living manufacturing monsters. Through Cryptozoology, Inc., she travels to rural nowhere, plants a few fake footprints, stages a blurry sighting, and cashes the check when the local cryptid festival starts selling T-shirts. It’s legal. Mostly. Victimless. Usually.

Then a teenage township trustee hires her to put Ballville, Ohio, on the map with a Pukwudgie sighting before the town’s New Year’s Eve bicentennial bash. Helen expects an easy payday: one costume, one legend, one carefully managed panic.

Instead, she finds something already hunting the fields and bridges outside town.

Now Helen’s fake monster has competition from a very real one: ancient, armor-plated, and perfectly happy to turn Ballville’s big celebration into a bloodbath. To stop it before the ball drops, Helen will have to dodge a suspicious sheriff’s deputy, a gold-toothed loan shark, one catastrophically ambitious client, and her own chain-smoking mother—who may be the only person in Ohio more dangerous than the monster.

Book Bites: Japanese Gothic

Japanese Gothic by Kylie Lee Baker
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Japanese Gothic is moody and atmospheric but flat. It's more style than substance. Our two main characters feel wooden. Lee, who flees to Japan after murdering his college roommate, spends much of the action self-medicating, creating narration that feels detached. 19th Century Samurai Sen exists only to please her domineering father and lacks agency. Baker sets a wonderful moody scene, built a ghost house far from civilization, but the blood inside feels token. The heart of the book sparks with Sen's and Lee's relationship, but, sadly, they only spend the last third of the book actually interacting. There's simply too much prologue here. There are themes of myth and time travel and love and loss, and Baker does manage to spin these threads into a clever denouement, but a clever ending only shines a light on Japanese Gothic's otherwise plodding narrative.

View all my reviews

Book Bites: Wild Love

Wild Love by Elsie Silver
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Gave this one twenty percent of its wordcount before throwing in the towel. Yes, romance novels often deal heavily in tropes, but Wild Love's opening chapters read like cardboard cutouts being puppeted across a bland backdrop. Tropes like the hunky, brooding billionaire and the type-A woman moving from the big city to the country work well if an author does them well or puts an interesting spin on them; Wild Love did neither, content to be a patched-together quilt of familiar plots and characters.

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Game Bites: Elementallis

 Elementallis

Developer: AnKae Games
Publisher: Top Hat Studios, Inc.

Rating 2 out of 5 stars

Elementallis should really be called 'A Wink to the Past.' The game wears its retro gaming bona fides on every screen. The player sprite and map layout and combat feel like they're ripped from Link's Awakening. The elemental magic system (complete with ring menus!) screams Secret of Mana.

The problem in comparing your game to Secret of Mana or A Link to the Past is that very few games are as good as Secret of Mana or A Link to the Past.