Occult – DaneCobain.com

Title: We Are Lucifer

Author: Amy McLean

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 364

Rating: 3.75/5

Amy McLean – We Are Lucifer

I picked this book up as part of Todd and Dane’s Indie Readalong, a project I run on my BookTube channel with a friend to encourage people to read more indie writers. I chose this one in particular because Amy also has a YouTube channel that I watch from time to time and so she seemed like an obvious choice to check out.

Now I’ll admit, I hadn’t done much research on the book beforehand and so I didn’t know much about it. From the title, I thought it was going to be dealing more with the devil and the occult, but it was more like a slightly darker take on the thrillers that are still storming up the bestseller lists. We’re talking stuff like Gone Girl, The Girl on the Train and all of those other books that got people talking thanks to their twists and turns.

This one isn’t necessarily twisty and turny because we get to follow a lot of the action through the eyes of the book’s antagonist, but it’ll still take you by surprise with some of the stuff that happens and I genuinely didn’t predict the outcome, which is a rarity for books like these. It didn’t pretend to be anything other than what it was, and it succeeded because of that.

Amy McLean

Of course, there are the occasional little niggles that I always seem to get with indie books, so there were a few minor typos and formatting errors. You could also somehow tell that it was an indie book just from the way that it was written, but I also thought that Amy’s writing style was absorbing and certainly good enough to carry her story.

All in all, it was a pretty good read and above average for an indie novel, but it didn’t blow my mind. I’d probably read some more of Amy’s stuff in the future though, and it was interesting to see how her voice as a writer reflected the author as a person. Go ahead and read it if it sounds good.

Amy McLean

Click here to buy We Are Lucifer.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – The Lost World | Review

Title: The Lost World

Author: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 280

Rating: 10/10

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – The Lost World

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s depiction of an area of the South American rainforest that still harbours prehistoric life is legendary. The writer, best-known for his Sherlock Holmes stories, also dabbled in science fiction and medical writing, and although in his later life he wasted a large amount of time dabbling with the occult and the spiritual, that didn’t affect his prolific productivity.

The Lost World is similar in premise to the Michael Crichton novel of the same name, and I can’t help but wonder where to draw the line between imitation and plagiarism. Professor Challenger, an imposing old man based on the real-life figure of William Rutherford, discovers a lost world, which is populated by prehistoric life.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

The Professor is joined by journalist Ed Malone, fellow scientist Professor Summerlee and the adventurous Lord John Roxton. Together, the party travels to the place where Challenger found evidence of the lost world, and what they find there is astonishing.

Interestingly, Professor Challenger returned in a number of other Conan Doyles novels, including The Poison Belt and The Land of Mist, the latter of which is about the supernatural and comes about as a result of Conan Doyle’s spurious spiritual beliefs. He’s a good character – bull-headed, entertaining, intellectual and aggressive, all at the same time. You’ll like him.

In all seriousness, this book is phenomenal – as good as, or even better than, the Sherlock Holmes stories. I strongly recommend you buy a copy and check it out – just beware of the dinosaurs and don’t get caught by the missing links.