Parisian Phoenix Publishing

This week, I read the work of two local authors– Phil Giunta whom I know from the Greater Lehigh Valley Writers Group and Reyna Favis from the Phillipsburg Writers Group and a former member and supporter of The Phillipsburg Historical Society. I’ve been writing about them a lot lately. (For example, here and here.)

I purchased Phil’s second edition of his novel, Testing the Prisoner, at the Easton Book Festival. It turns out Phil wrote the novel to explore what happens when our traumas get the better of us. The book recently earned a finalist award in the horror category at the American Book Fest. But while 1. I admire Phil’s clean and enjoyable sentences, I 2. also respect his attempt to use fiction to “bring awareness” (there is never any easy way to say we’re going to talk about a distasteful and troubling social issue) to domestic violence and child abuse.

Now, I gave Phil’s book four stars on Amazon and three on Goodreads because I’m hard on books, but I also want to boost local author’s algorithms and get them more readers. Heck, I also want to get MY authors more readers. I want to get enough readers so this can be my full-time job publishing books and inviting authors like Phil to work with me.

But MY tastes and reactions are not the same as an ordinary reader. I examine words and sentences through the lens of an language major (English and French), a professional journalist and a historian and that’s without considering my life experience as a woman, a person with a mobility disorder, and my own history of trauma.

The supernatural allows form to our darkness

I don’t think Phil would consider it a spoiler if I told you that he uses this book to provide physical form to the demons that our trauma’s create, and I hope he doesn’t mind that I say publicly what I told him in a private text: that the reason I gave his book the rating I did was because I don’t know if I agree with the ending and that he and I can debate that at a future time.

Because he raises another important question: When do we forgive those who have wronged and do we have to fully forgive in order to heal?

But that’s what’s great about paranormal stories. In my view, people are willing to travel to dark places in the name of a supernatural phenomenon. In my Fashion and Fiends series, I intentionally use “monsters” as a way to personify human failings. In the first book, Manipulations, a 400-year-old fire mage stalks a supermodel for her latent water magick. Sounds creepy and a little fun, right?

What if I told you that in my first book, Manipulations, a cute guy turns out to be a creep and entangles the ingenue in an abusive relationship that no one else can see. Nobody wants to read that for fun.

The paranormal allows us to critique the past

I finished Reyna’s third book, Soul Search, last night. I gave her three stars on Amazon and two on Goodreads, but that rating may have been stronger had I started in the beginning and not in the middle. Reyna uses her paranormal mystery series to entertain and educate about history and also topics that I assume are important to her, such as her background with search-and-rescue dogs.

Reyna did a masterful job of describing, explaining and pulling us into the past, both in highlighting the current state of structures and places with historical significance and using ghosts and the archaelogical/material remnants of the past and cultural practices to explore difficult topics, in this case, the reality of the impact slavery had on the Northern United States and the fact that the North did indeed have slaves and participate in slavery.

The reader knows that Reyna fully understands these topics, and others like the culture of American indigenous peoples and the different behaviors and uses for working dogs. And I also think I might trust Reyna to clean up a messy crime scene, but that’s neither here nor there.

In both books– the use of the supernatural allows readers to go dark places either in the psyche or in history. People need to face their demons, even if the demons stem from the acts of their ancestors.