Author: Mind On Fire Books

I have always been attracted to the metaphysical; this blog and press is my exploration of the interjacent genres of horror, sci-fi, and fantasy. ​
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Beast Movie Review by Horror Author, A.R. Braun

Beast Movie Review scored a 5 out of 5 hatchets from Horror Author, A.R. Braun.

This film is not to be confused with The Beast, which came out in 1975–a shocking, excellent horror film—but the 2017 movie has a great story and character arc, plus a strong plot.

Teenager Moll (Jessie Buckley), a tour guide and troubled girl, is looking for meaning in life. She has a reputation, for she stabbed another student when in high school. If she’s not under attack from her controlling mother, Hilary (Geraldine James), she’s being upstaged at her birthday party. I know the feeling well—it’s always about someone else—so I can relate to her. Her sister, Polly (Shannon Target), tells everyone at the party that she and her husband are going to have a baby. Big deal. Save it for the dinner table.

Beast Movie Review for Mind on Fire Books

That night, Moll says screw that and goes clubbing. She meets a young man there and dances the night away. When the sun comes up, the boy makes his move, and when she tells him she just wants to go home, he tries to rape her.

Enter Pascal (Johnny Flynn), a bad boy who champions her, holding a gun on the rapist, who runs away. Pascal then patches up a wound Moll gave herself, and bam! She’s infatuated.

Review by Horror Writer, A.R. Braun. Check out his Dark Fiction masterpiece, “66Sick,” here.

Upon arriving home, she’s read the riot act by her mom for staying out all night. Moll invites Pascal to her house to do some repairs, since he works with his hands. When Pascal’s invited to dinner, he stands up to her controlling mother and Moll’s brother, for it was his fault, not Moll’s, that her niece was left alone. He was late picking her up.

The whirlwind romance carries Moll away, but there’s a killer on the loose. And the townspeople suspect Moll’s boyfriend; therefore, they give her hell, even at the funeral of a girl when Moll tries to pay her respects.

As the tale weaves, the viewer has a hard time figuring out who the villain is. Moll claims the stabbing at school was self-defense. When she tries to make amends, the girl now a woman throws her out of the department store the latter works at. Pascal treats Moll like a queen. Surely he couldn’t be the killer. But somebody’s murdering all these people.

Review by Horror Writer, A.R. Braun. Check out his Dark Fiction masterpiece, “66Sick,” here.

Beast Movie Review for Mind on Fire Books

Is Pascal a serial killer, or are the townspeople falsely accusing him because he’s a bad boy? Is Moll crazy and the real serial killer (Polly tells Pascal at dinner that Moll’s a wild one)? Or will Moll find out it’s Pascal and stop him, or fail to? All these questions will be answered on viewing Beast, on Amazon Prime Video.

My only complaint is that it’s supposed to be set in New Jersey, but they’re obviously non-Americans who drive on the right side of the vehicle. But it doesn’t ruin it. And I don’t like most movies. This one captivated me.

About the writer

A. R. BRAUN is a horror author with fourteen publication credits, one a dark poem, including “NREM Sleep” in the D.O.A. anthology; “Freaks” in Downstate Story magazine; “The Unwanted Visitors” in the Vermin anthology; “Coven” in the Heavy Metal Horror anthology; “Remember Me?” in Horror Bound magazine; “Shades of Gray (the Symbiosis of Light and Dark)” in Micro Horror magazine; and “The Interloper” in the Bonded by Blood 2: a Romance in Red anthology, among others.

You can reach him on Twitter as @ARBraun and on Instagram as a.r._braun.

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The Manitou by Graham Masterton – Book Review by Horror Writer, A.R. Braun

The Manitou is definitely Graham Masterton’s bread-and-butter, the series being the best books he’s ever written. He went on to write many great novels, a total of 101 in all!

In 1976’s The Manitou, based in San Francisco, something is growing on the back of an attractive woman named Karen Tandy’s neck—perceived as a tumor—which baffles her doctors.

Desperate for help, the good docs bring in a charlatan psychic named Harry Erskine—an unlikely hero who’s the perfect protagonist—as a paranormal investigator. Erskine helps the doctors discover that an ancient Native-American medicine man named Misquamacus, the most powerful Shaman ever, is back to seek revenge against the white man for stealing his country, as well as other atrocities. Reborn from a neck, the Native American is squat, has stunted limbs, but is none the less powerful. Able to call up the most powerful demons in the world who can’t be exercised by Christianity because they were before Christ, the shaman’s chief demon is a squid spirit and, yes, I believe it’s Cthulhu.

This infernal medicine man is feared by all as the body count rises. Everything in the world has a Manitou, a Native-American spirit, and Harry and the good doctors call upon a modern-day Shaman named John Singing Rock for help, definitely less powerful than Misquamacus. They battle and wrack their brains to come up with the best modern Manitou to fight the insidious shaman.

Will they be able to stop the carnage so vehement it’ll be mass-murder? Or will they end up butchered, like the cops in the elevator?

This novel was ten times better than I expected it to be, and I highly recommend this gem, plus the sequels, which are all great. You’d better hope Native-American spirits don’t come looking for revenge!

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A.R. Braun on Mind on Fire Books

Review by Horror Writer, A.R. Braun. You can check out his latest Novel, “Dogman of Illinois, here.

A.R. Braun will also be featured on our anthology Mad Men, available for presale now.

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Henry Miller’s 11 Writing Commandments

In this post, we share the American writer and painter, Henry Miller’s 11 Writing Commandments.

Henry Miller was an American writer and painter. He was born 26 December 1891, and died 7 June 1980. His autobiographical novels achieve a candour—particularly about sex—that made them a liberating influence in mid-20th-century literature. He is also notable for a free and easy American style and a gift for comedy that springs from his willingness to admit to feelings others conceal and an almost eager acceptance of the bad along with the good. Because of their sexual frankness, his major works were banned in Britain and the United States until the 1960s, but they were widely known earlier from copies smuggled in from France.

The list read as follows:

  1. Work on one thing at a time until finished.
  2. Start no more new books, add no more new material to “Black Spring.”
  3. Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.
  4. Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!
  5. When you can’t create you can work.
  6. Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.
  7. Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.
  8. Don’t be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.
  9. Discard the Program when you feel like it—but go back to it next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.
  10. Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.
  11. Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.

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7 Mind-Provoking Quotes from H.G. Wells

As one of the founding fathers of science fiction, Herbert George Wells certainly had a lot to say about the human race. From mankind’s fondness for war to our place in the universe, Wells certainly didn’t shy away from sharing his opinions. In honor of what would have been his 154th birthday, here are a few of H.G. Wells’s greatest hits.

1. ON WAR

“If we don’t end war, war will end us.”

—From Things to Come (1936)

John F. Kennedy’s speechwriters later adapted the phrase for his 1961 address to the United Nations: “The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.”

2. ON GLOBALIZATION

“Our true nationality is mankind.”

—From The Outline of History (1920)

3. ON WRITING

“I write as straight as I can, just as I walk as straight as I can, because that is the best way to get there.”

—From Experiment in Autobiography (1934)

4. ON GOLF

“The uglier a man’s legs are, the better he plays at golf. It’s almost a law.”

—From Bealby: A Holiday (1915)

5. ON THE FUTURE

“We were making the future, and hardly any of us troubled to think what future we were making.”

—From When The Sleeper Wakes (1899)

6. ON EDUCATION

“Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.”

—From The Outline of History (1920)

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7. ON REALITY

“The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn.”

—From The Discovery of the Future (1902)

Herbert George Wells (21 September 1866 – 13 August 1946) was an English writer. He was prolific in many genres, writing dozens of novels, short stories, and works of social commentary, satire, biography, and autobiography, and even including two books on recreational war games. He is now best remembered for his science fiction novels and is often called a “father of science fiction”, along with Jules Verne and Hugo Gernsback.During his own lifetime, however, he was most prominent as a forward-looking, even prophetic social critic who devoted his literary talents to the development of a progressive vision on a global scale. A futurist, he wrote a number of utopian works and foresaw the advent of aircraft, tanks, space travel, nuclear weapons, satellite television and something resembling the World Wide Web. His science fiction imagined time travel, alien invasion, invisibility, and biological engineering. 

For a list of his top 30 works, click here.

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Lovecraft’s Literary Horror Birthday

Howard Phillips Lovecraft, born August 20th, 1890.”To say to a man ‘your belief is foolish’ is not in any way akin to saying ‘you’re a damn fool”. Often circumstances are such that a superior mind may harbour a delusion while a very inferior mind (through the chance circumstance of never having been exposed to delusion, or through lack of enough imaginative sensitiveness to be deluded) will be absolutely free from it. In such a case a wise man will have a damn foolish opinion, while a damn fool will be perfectly correct.”HPL in a letter to Robert E Howard, November 5, 1933

(Statue by Lee Joyner)

Happy Birthday Lovecraft, from Mind on Fire Books
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9 Quotes from Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne was born 4 July 1804, and died 19 May 1864.

Nine Quotes

9 Hawthorne quotes from Mind on Fire Books
  1. Words – so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.
  2. Easy reading is damn hard writing.
  3. Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness.
  4. The only sensible ends of literature are, first, the pleasurable toil of writing; second, the gratification of one’s family and friends; and lastly, the solid cash.
  5. What we call real estate – the solid ground to build a house on – is the broad foundation on which nearly all the guilt of this world rests.
  6. It is very queer, but not the less true, that people are generally quite as vain, or even more so, of their deficiencies than of their available gifts.
  7. No man for any considerable period can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.
  8. We men of study, whose heads are in our books, have need to be straightly looked after! We dream in our waking moments, and walk in our sleep.
  9. A single dream is more powerful than a thousand realities.

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Nathaniel Hawthorne was an American novelist and short story writer, best known for writing The Scarlet Letter. Along with Herman Melville and Edgar Allan Poe, Hawthorne’s work belongs to the sub-genre of Dark Romanticism. The genre has an emphasis on human fallibility where lapses in judgement allow men and women to drift toward self-destruction.

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Literary Birthday – 30 July – Emily Brontë

Emily Brontë was born 30 July 1818, and died 19 December 1848.

Nine Quotes

Happy Birthday Emily Bronte from Mind on Fire Books
  1. He’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.
  2. Terror made me cruel.
  3. A person who has not done one half his day’s work by ten o’clock runs a chance of leaving the other half undone
  4. Nature and Books belong to the eyes that see them.
  5. If I could I would always work in silence and obscurity, and let my efforts be known by their results.
  6. Proud people breed sad sorrows for themselves.
  7. The tyrant grinds down his slaves and they don’t turn against him, they crush those beneath them.
  8. A sensible man ought to find sufficient company in himself.
  9. Any relic of the dead is precious, if they were valued living.

Emily Brontë was an English novelist and poet, remembered for her novel,Wuthering Heights, which is now considered a classic of English literature. She wrote under the pen name Ellis Bell. Her sisters were Anne Brontë and Charlotte Brontë.

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Literary Birthday – 26 July – Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley was born 26 July 1894, and died 22 November 1963.

15 Aldous Huxley Quotes

Aldous Huxley. Mind on Fire Books
  1. The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.
  2. Every man’s memory is his private literature.
  3. There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.
  4. The proper study of mankind is books.
  5. That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.
  6. A bad book is as much of a labour to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author’s soul.
  7. Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.
  8. Experience is not what happens to you; it’s what you do with what happens to you.
  9. I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.
  10. The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
  11. Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.
  12. Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
  13. Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
  14. Hell isn’t merely paved with good intentions; it’s walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.
  15. That all men are equal is a proposition which at ordinary times no sane individual has ever given his assent.

Aldous Huxley was an English writer, best known for his dystopian novel, Brave New World. He also edited the magazine Oxford Poetry. Huxley was a humanist, pacifist, and satirist, who was also well known for his advocacy and consumption of psychedelic drugs.